Maha notches more cures than new infections; 440 deaths

Mumbai, Sep 18 (IANS) In a rare occurrence, Maharashtra on Friday notched more Covid-19 recoveries compared to new cases, besides recording 440 deaths, health officials said here.

The state recorded 21,656 new cases, lower than the highest tally of 24,886 recorded on September 11, taking Maharashtra’s Covid tally to 11,67,496.

Adding a staggering 440 more fatalities, including 35 old deaths reconciled now, the state’s death toll mounted to 31,791.

The state’s recovery rate improved for the third consecutive day, from 70.90 per cent to 71.47 per cent, while the mortality rate stood at 2.72 per cent on Friday.

Against this, the highest ever — 22,078 — fully recovered patients returned home, more than the number of fresh cases for the day.

This has taken the total number of recoveries to 834,432, much higher than the 300,887 active cases currently present in the state.

As per the figures on Friday, there was one death roughly every 3.2 minutes and a whopping 902 new cases added every hour to the state tally.

Nagpur led Friday’s death toll with 64 fatalities, followed by Mumbai (52), Pune (39), Satara (34), Thane (32), Ahmednagar and Sangli (21 each), Nashik and Jalgaon (16 each), Solapur, Aurangabad and Latur (12 each), Kolhapur (11), Yavatmal (10), Raigad (9), Beed (7), Sindhudurg (6), Palghar (5), Nanded and Gondia (4 each), Dhule, Parbhani and Washim (3 each), Osmanabad (2), and Jalna, Hingoli, Akola, Amravati and Buldhana (1 each).

The day witnessed a sharp spurt in fatalities from Nagpur, Satara, Ahmednagar, Sangli, Nashik and Jalgaon, even as six districts in the state recorded no deaths.

After remaining in the sub-50 range for the past 37 days, Mumbai recorded 52 deaths on Friday, taking the city’s death toll to 8,375, while the number of corona cases shot up by 2,283 to 180,668.

Of the 8 circles in the state, the situation in Mumbai circle (MMR, comprising Mumbai, Thane, Palghar and Raigad) remains alarming with fatalities shooting up by 98 to 14,568, while a spike of 5,457 new infectees took its tally to 425,790.

Pune district’s Covid cases touched 253,554 while its death toll increased to 5,133.

Thane district has witnessed 166,982 cases so far, while its death toll increased to 4,449 now.

With another 85 fatalities, the Pune circle’s (comprising Pune, Solapur and Satara districts) death toll increased to 6,852 while its daily case tally zoomed up by another high of 5,580 to 312,263.

Nashik circle recorded 3,168 fatalities and 151,797 cases, followed by Kolhapur circle’s 2,223 deaths and 75,876 cases, and Nagpur circle’s 1,781 deaths and 79,077 cases.

Latur circle recorded 1,224 deaths and 45,036 cases, Aurangabad circle had 1,168 fatalities and 44,176 cases, followed by Akola circle with 695 deaths and 31,720 cases.

Meanwhile, the number of people sent to home quarantine jumped to 17,78,792, while the number of those in institutional quarantine went down from 36,827 to 36,767 on Friday.

–IANS

qn/arm