Ludhiana to be among top six worst-hit districts: CMC

Nitin Jain

Tribune News Service

Ludhiana, March 31

Ludhiana will be among the six districts to be worst-hit when Punjab will touch peak of fresh Covid cases around April 6 and it will be more alarming than the surge witnessed in the last September and October.

Punjab is among five states accounting for over 80 per cent of the total new daily Covid cases being reported in the country for the past several days.

8 dead, 328 new cases in Ludhiana

The other worst-hit districts will be Jalandhar, Patiala, Mohali, Hoshiarpur, and Kapurthala.

This was projected by experts in the Department of Community Medicine at Christian Medical College (CMC), Ludhiana.

In a report on estimated projections submitted to the state government, a copy of which is with The Tribune, the CMC experts have predicted that the new cases will tail off by the mid or late May. “The number of daily new cases will be more than the peak witnessed in last September and October,” they warned.

55 more die in Punjab as nation sees 72,330 new Covid cases

Last year, the state had reported a maximum number of 2,896 cases in a day on September 17.

The prediction has revealed that the daily new cases can go as high as 6,500 during the ensuing peak and will come down to 1,500 as the cases will tail off by mid or late May.

According to the report, nearly 50 per cent of the total cases in the current surge were less than 40 years of age. However, there were no significant reinfection cases (based on the data available), the experts reported.

The experts have recommended strict enforcement of restrictions, including religious and political meetings, besides keeping the schools shut till the end of April.

Rising trend

The official data revealed that the positivity rate and number of active cases have increased manifold this month. While the positivity rate touched an all-time high of 6.96 per cent on March 25, which was mere 2.26 per cent on February 25, the number of active cases shot up 553 per cent from 3,870 on February 25 to 21,405 on March 25.

Similarly, the case fatality rate (CFR) rose to 2.9 per cent with 6,517 deaths as on March 25, which had touched 1.4 per cent on March 11.

Testing up

The state government has ramped up the testing with a record 2,54,049 sampling between March 19 and 25, which was almost double than 1,34,611 done between February 19 and 25.