As cases drop in Delhi, Mumbai, a question: Has coronavirus pandemic peaked?

The Covid-19 pandemic may have peaked in Delhi and the daily caseloads are on the wane in Mumbai and Chennai, but there is no sign of the disease reaching anywhere close to its peak in the rest of the country.

But the jury is still out on Delhi as there are suspicions about the efficiency of quick diagnostic tests used by the local administration in bulk.

On Monday — a day Delhi for the first time recorded less than 1,000 new cases — AIIMS director Dr Randeep Guleria, a member of the core team monitoring the Covid-19 situation in India, said the national capital might have crossed the peak.

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Typically, outbreak peaks are known if the daily cases see a downward trend for two weeks, which does not seem to be happening across the country.

“Delhi may have peaked out. But the worry is that Delhi shifted almost entirely to rapid antigen tests with low sensitivity. So no one is sure,” a senior biologist told DH.

The numbers are on a decline in two other erstwhile hotspots — Mumbai and Chennai.

After reporting nearly 2,000 cases a day till June, Chennai is plateauing at 1,100-1,300 cases since the beginning of July. Mumbai recorded its maximum count of 2,077 cases on June 27 but the numbers are on a downward spiral since the last two weeks.

The situation, however, is exactly reverse in other parts of the states. There is a big spike in the suburbs of Mumbai whereas nine districts of south Tamil Nadu are experiencing an exponential rise in the outbreak. More than 85% of such cases were reported in the past one month. Madurai tops the chart with nearly 9,000 cases.

Adjoining Kerala, the first Indian state to report Covid-19, is witnessing a fresh surge because of which a previous estimate of the state reaching its peak by August is unlikely to hold water.

The current trend might continue for one or two more months, said Dr Amar Fettle, Kerala health department nodal officer. Majority of the fresh cases now are through local contacts.

The numbers are piling up in Andhra Pradesh, which now has the fastest growth rate in reporting new cases.

In Gujarat, officials said Ahmedabad reached its peak while cities like Surat were at the peak at the moment. The other parts of the state are at different stages.

Jayanti Ravi, Principal Secretary, Health, told DH: “Ahmedabad has already reached its peak while Surat is at the peak.”

Over the past one month, the number of new cases has gone down in Ahmedabad while Surat has been leading the chart since the beginning of this month.

On the east, Covid-19 numbers are piling up in Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. Health officials refuse to hazard a guess on when the peak would be reached.

Assam has been reporting nearly 1,000 cases daily in the past few days leading many to believe that this could be the peak of positive cases. But officials are not sure.

“It’s difficult to say whether it’s the peak or not,” principal secretary, health department, Samir Kumar Sinha said.

Last week, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee urged people to be cautious as experts have predicted that Covid-19 infection in the state will peak in the next two months. For the last three days, the state reported more than 2,000 fresh cases daily.

With 1,076 fresh Covid-19 cases reported in the last 24 hours, Bihar situation remains quite grim. Its Covid-19 tally crossed the 27,500 mark out of which nearly 15,000 cases were reported in the last 18 days.

“I don’t see any prospect of the problem getting over soon,” said Sitabhra Sinha, a scientist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, who is tracking the pandemic through computer models for months.

(With inputs from E T B Sivapriyan, Mrityunjay Bose, Arjun Raghunath, Soumya Das, Abhay Kumar, Satish Jha and Sumir Karmakar)