‘Peak of surge ends, COVID count near zero in Bengal'
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olkata: With the number of both COVID samples and positivity rate on the wane for about a week, doctors in the city said the peak of the spike is over and the count is now nearing zero.
Even as the state health department stopped updating the state's COVID data since June 10, experts said going by the downswing trend in Kerala and Maharashtra, from where the uptick began, along with only a handful of COVID patients in city hospitals, the COVID-19 graph in the state is also in the ebbing phase.
Bengal's active cases, according to the Covid India dashboard that maintains records for all states across the country, stood at 747 on June 9, when the state submitted data for the last time.
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"COVID-19 spike is not a major issue this time in our state. The number is already coming down, and most of the positive cases did not even require hospital admission," said a senior health official. The official also said the uptick in Bengal was caused by the new XFG sub-variant, which belongs to the Omicron variant.
Chief microbiologist at Peerless Hospital, Bhaskar Narayan Chaudhuri, also confirmed that the number of positive cases have dropped drastically.
The overall active case load in India surged to the highest of 7,400 on June 14, which scaled down to 3,256 on June 27.
"At a certain point in time, we were getting around 5 positive samples out of 10; now it has gone down to only about one in 10," said molecular pathologist Abhirup Sarkar, lab director at Suraksha. Microbiologist Shelly Sharma Ganguly of Manipal Broadway also said the lab was getting three to four positive cases every day even a week ago. But now it is getting one or two cases occasionally Critical Care Medicine Specialist Soutik Panda of Woodlands Hospital said his hospital has not got any new positive case for about a week.
"Apollo Multispecialty Hospital has only two patients currently with no new case," said Apollo Critical Care and ECMO physician, Arpan Chakraborty.
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