Mumbai’s COVID-19 cases cross 6,000

With 475 new cases reported on April 29, Mumbai now has 6,457 COVID-19 cases--65% of Maharashtra’s total and 20% of India’s.

Of the new cases, 170 had tested positive between April 26-27 and not been included in earlier updates, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said in its update last evening.

Mumbai, home to more than 12.8 million people, had reported its first COVID-19 case on March 12. It took 40 days for Mumbai to cross the 3,000-case mark, and only 10 days thereafter to cross 6,000 cases.

Mumbai now reports almost twice the cases in Thailand (2,947), which recorded the first case outside China on January 13.

In the same April 29 update, 26 COVID-19 deaths were reported--16 of patients with comorbidities. Ten deaths were from the previous week and had not been included in earlier updates. By now, the city has reported 270 deaths--more than any Indian city or state.

Meanwhile, 193 patients were discharged on April 29 after having recovered, taking the total to 1,427.

In Mumbai, 471 of every million people had COVID-19, while in Delhi 169 per million were, IndiaSpend reported on April 29. The death rate per million was 19 in Mumbai while it was four in Delhi, as of April 28. Of all COVID-19 patients, 4% had died in Mumbai, while 1.6% had died in Delhi.

“Our strategy is to timely identify and isolate suspected patients,” Daksha Shah, deputy executive health officer with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), had told IndiaSpend, as reported on April 24. “Because of this strategy, cases are seen on the rise.”

“On identifying a [positive] case, we are doing contact tracing and testing high-risk contacts of that patient within the family and the area,” Shah said. “Testing is more in the form of a targeted approach. Most cases that we have identified in Dharavi and also in other congested areas are among those contacts. We have quarantined them and taken relevant measures.”

(Mallapur is a senior analyst and Jacob an intern with IndiaSpend.)