Bengaluru sees record Covid-19 cases for two days

The city recorded 3,799 Covid cases on Thursday, the highest to date. This comes a day after setting the highest single-day record for fresh cases on Wednesday, when 3,571 cases were revealed.

A government official who did not wish to be named said that the spike in numbers will not abate soon as the scale of the infection is rising.

“We are in a situation where migrant workers are coming back to Bengaluru and moving around freely. Many cases are cropping up in middle-class and upper-class homes that have household help who are helping to drive up the infection,” the official said.

Ban cloth masks

He added that this came down to the lax manner in which social distancing is being followed and recommended that cloth masks be banned because the latest findings have shown that they are not effective.

“Instead, people should be wearing three-layer masks. The World Health Organisation has been saying from the beginning that masks offer better protection than vaccines,” he said.

While epidemiologist Dr Giridhar Babu acknowledged the spike, he suggested it would not be ideal to consider day-to-day cases. “Instead, we should be looking at figures from a weekly point of view,” he said.

According to the existing data, there have been 23,877 cases in the city over the last seven days. In comparison, the seven previous days (September 4 to 10) saw 21,504 cases. Numbers were even lower in the seven days preceding that (August 28 to September 3), with 19,973 cases.

Dr Babu said the increased cases are an indicator that the disease is spreading into new areas of the city that had previously not been reporting the kind of numbers they now are. “These are areas such as RR Nagar zone, for example. This is a result of increased mobility,” he said.

Dr Vijendra Bilaguli, chief health officer, BBMP, cited increased testing as also being behind the numbers. Palike data shows that 28,803 tests were conducted in the city on Thursday, which is about 6,000 more tests than was done on Monday, when the city registered 2,966 cases.