UP, Chhattisgarh are the new worries in India's Covid surge

Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh – two states with poor health infrastructure - may emerge as the next Corona trouble spots as new cases have surged in both in the last seven days.

Till a week ago (April 4), Uttar Pradesh was not among the top five states with the maximum caseloads, but the numbers rose steadily since then.

For the last two days, Uttar Pradesh is at the third position after Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh with the reporting of more than 9,500 cases in the last 24 hours.

What makes the UP situation even more worrying is the current trend in the value of R or reproduction number, which denotes how many healthy individuals will get the infection from a Covid-19 positive person. An R value of 1.9 means 10 Covid positive persons will spread the infections to 19 others.

“With data up to April 8, Uttar Pradesh has a R value of 1.83 which is almost the same as what it was in late March-early April last year, i.e., at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in India prior to the lockdown,” said Sitabhra Sinha, a scientist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. This is the highest R value recorded for any state at the moment.

Also read: A year on, India's Covid-19 situation grimmer with 'more infectious' variants, surge in cases

The apprehension is corroborated by another mathematical projection that predicts more than 100,000 new cases each day in the most populous state by the end of April going by the current trend. Even assuming 5% of the persons require hospitalisation with oxygen, the state needs to arrange approximately 5,000 beds required each day.

“There has to be an aggressive containment strategy to prevent such a trajectory,” Giridhar Babu, an epidemiologist at the Public Health Foundation of India told DH.

The situation in Chhattisgarh too is worrisome as two districts - Durg and Raipur - are among the top ten districts in terms of the maximum caseload. The number of new cases doubled in the last one week – from less than 6000 on April 4 to nearly 12,000 on April 10.

Durg was the first district to announce a lock down during the second wave while the state reported more than 10,000 daily new cases consecutively for the last three days. It has an R value of 1.57, which is one of the highest among the states.

In the last 24 hours, more than 1.45 lakh new Covid-19 cases have been reported with Maharashtra leading the pack with nearly 59,000 new followed by Chhattisgarh with 11,447 cases. The daily death toll rose to 794 while the active caseload crossed the one million mark.