Amid strict lockdown across the nation due to a steep rise in coronavirus COVID-19 cases, Mumbai on Thursday recorded a total of 2,043 positive cases, with the addition of 107 new cases in the last 24 hours, according to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). During the same period, three more patients died due to the pandemic in the city, taking the toll to 116, it said.
The BMC said another 21 people have recovered from the disease. With this, the number of cured cases now stood at 202 in the city. The civic body also said it has admitted 299 people in hospitals due to possible COVID-19 infection.
The number of coronavirus positive cases in Mumbai's largest hotspot Dharavi rose to 86 on Thursday with 26 people found positive in the last 24 hours. A COVID-19 patient died on Thursday in Dharavi and so far, a total of nine deaths have been reported from Dharavi.
Maharashtra became the first state to touch 3,081 positive cases, with an addition of 165 new cases in the last 24 hours.
The BMC on Thursday claimed that it had conducted over 27,000 COVID-19 tests, which is 12.59 per cent of the total number of tests carried out in the country so far. In a press release, the civic body also claimed that there has been no community transmission of the infection in Mumbai. It had conducted 27,397 COVID-19 tests till April 13, against 2,17,554 tests carried out across the country, the BMC said. This shows that 12.59 per cent of the total number of tests conducted across the country were carried out in Mumbai alone, it said.
The civic body further informed that it had decided to conduct tests for asymptomatic patients only after seven days of quarantine to avoid the possibility of "false negatives". "It is observed that the test results of asymptomatic patients often came out negative if they were conducted within seven days of quarantine. In medical terms such tests are called false negative," the release stated.
The BMC also arranged coronavirus tests for Mumbai journalists.
Until now, the BMC was conducting swab tests of high- risk contacts of positive patients as soon as they were quarantined. According to the release, the civic body has set up 97 fever clinics across the city and 3,585 persons were screened at these facilities, which are located near containment zones where one or more COVID-19 cases were reported.
Of the 912 persons tested at these clinics, only five were found to be positive, thus ruling out the possibility of community transmission, the civic body claimed. "Since the fever clinics are located in congested areas and slum pockets in the city, where only five out of 912 persons tested positive for COVID-19, it shows that only 0.54 per cent people were infected. This shows that there is no community transmission in Mumbai municipal limits," it said.
