As Curve Starts to Bend in Delhi, Mumbai; These 2 Cities Emerge as India’s New COVID-19 Hotspots

While the two prime cities are undergoing remarkable recovery, the number of COVID-19 cases have been on a sudden sharp rise in Pune and Bengaluru.

New Delhi: Delhi and Mumbai, India’s two of the busiest stations and the worst-hit COVID-19 cities, are now on a path to recovery with the number of coronavirus infections dropping significantly every day. At the same time, the country’s total tally continues to surge as it went from 14 lakh on Monday to 15 lakh on Wednesday.

This brings us to the question, where are the new cases emerging from?

More than 48,000 new COVID-19 cases and 768 deaths were reported in the last 24 hours, showed health ministry’s data updated at 8 AM.

However, Mumbai on Tuesday recorded its lowest single-day spike with 717 COVID-19 cases, taking the total tally to 1,10,846 and 6,184 deaths.

Similarly, in Delhi, the number of cases increased slightly with 1,056 new infections as compared to the lowest spike of 613 cases on Tuesday. In fact, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal delinked hotels booked as COVID-19 facilities as the beds remained vacant for weeks.

The Delhi government had also remarked that after facing an alarming shortage of hospital beds last month, nearly 80 per cent of the beds in government and private hospitals are also now lying vacant.

The New Hotspots

While the two prime cities are undergoing remarkable recovery, the number of COVID-19 cases have been on a sudden sharp rise in Pune and Bengaluru. Pune, with just one-third of Mumbai’s population, has been reporting over 3,000 cases everyday taking the total count to 28,142 as on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Bengaluru, which recently came off a week-long total lockdown, recorded 1,898 new cases and 102 more fatalities in a single day on Tuesday.

What is more alarming is that in both these cities, the recovery rates as of last week stood at 23 per cent in Bengaluru and 35 per cent in Pune.

If the surge continues the same way, the two cities may have to wait till end of September or October for the curve to start bending.