Second wave has hit peak, daily cases may decrease in coming days: Kejriwal

NEW DELHI: Arvind Kejriwal, Chief Minister of Delhi, on Thursday, September 25, said that second wave of coronavirus has likely hit the peak in Delhi, hinting that the cases of infection will decline in the coming days. He said that the government was ‘keeping its fingers crossed’ and hoped that the COVID-19 cases will ‘gradually’ come down due to the steps taken by the Delhi government. “All the experts believe that the second wave (of coronavirus), which had come in Delhi, appears to have hit its peak. Now, the cases will come down in the coming days,” Kejriwal told reporters.

He added that the daily cases of new infections were under control between July 1 and August 17 and on an average, 1,100-1,200 new cases were being reported daily, he said. It was from August 17 that the daily COVID positive cases started rising from around 1,100 to 1,500. “At this point, we did not take any chances with public safety and immediately increased testing from around 20,000 tests to 60,000 tests per day,” said Kejriwal. He added that his government had learnt the lesson well in advance that the best way to defeat coronavirus is to conduct aggressive testing, identify and isolate those found positive. According to Kejriwal, if the government scaled down the daily testing from 60,000 to the previous 20,000, the total number of new COVID cases would also decrease. “However, this is not the solution.”

Kejriwal went on to say that he hopes that the steps taken by the Delhi government, including increasing containment zones from 550 in mid-August to around 2,000 currently, will gradually bring down the number of COVID-19 positive cases in the coming days.