Mumbai, (Samajweekly) Maharashtra fatalities again shot past the 100 mark with 109 deaths, while the tally in Mumbai city crossed the 50,000 mark on Monday, health officials said.
The state on Monday recorded 109 deaths, marking an increase of 18 over Sunday’s two-digit toll of 91, besides 2,553 new Covid-19 cases.
The state has recorded previous highs of three-digit tallies — 103 deaths (June 2), 122 (June 3), 123 (June 4), 139 (June 5) and 120 (June 6) — plummeting to 91 (June 7) — and zooming up to 109 on Monday.
This comes to roughly one death every 13 minutes, and an average 106 new cases notched every hour, in the state.
Maharashtra has been recording 75-plus fatalities and new patients over 2K daily for the past 14 days, with the previous single-day highest figure of 3,041 infections notched on May 24.
With 109 fatalities, the state’s death toll has touched 3,169 while the total number of coronavirus patients increased from Sunday’s 85,975 to 88,528 on Monday.
The health department said that of the total number of cases declared till date, 44,374 were active cases as on Monday.
The state has recorded a recovery rate of 46.28 per cent and a mortality (death) rate of 3.57 per cent.
Of the total 109 fatalities on Monday, 64 were recorded in Mumbai alone , taking the city’s death toll up from Sunday’s 1,638 to 1,702 now, while the number of Covid-19 positive patients here shot past the 50K mark — up by 1,311 cases to touch 50,085 now.
Besides Mumbai’s 64 deaths, there were 8 fatalities in Aurangabad, 7 in Pune, 6 each in Jalgaon and Solapur, 5 in Thane (Thane, Bhiwandi, Ulhasnagar, Kalyan-Dombivali), 4 in Dhule, 2 in Nashik, and one each in Palghar, Ahmednagar, Jalna and Nanded.
The victims comprised 71 men and 38 women and nearly 73 per cent of them suffered from other serious ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, heart problems and asthma.
On the positive side, a total of 1,661 fully cured patients returned home on Monday, taking the number of those discharged from the hospitals to 49,975.
Amid apprehensions expressed in some quarters, Maharashtra eased into Unlock 3.0 on Monday, with semi-normal crowds, traffic and chaos on roads as people rushed to their workplaces after over 80 days of lockdown.
The MMR (Thane Division) continued to cause grave concerns with 70 Covid-19 deaths, pulling up the toll to 2,134, and taking the positive cases to 66,640 on Monday.
Though trailing a distant third after MMR, Pune Division’s fatalities touched 550, besides 11,936 patients.
Since June 1, Thane district with 13,528 cases and 336 fatalities has zoomed past Pune district which has 9,877 patients and 413 deaths.
The next major region of concern is Nashik Division with 244 deaths and 3,182 positive cases, followed by Aurangabad Division with 108 fatalities and 2,536 cases, and Akola Division with 61 deaths and 1,401 cases.
There’s Latur Division with 16 deaths and 489 cases, Kolhapur Division with 25 deaths and 1,302 patients, and finally Nagpur Division with 12 deaths and 967 cases.
Meanwhile, the number of people sent to home-quarantine increased from Sunday’s 5,58,463 to 5,64,736 on Monday, while those in institutional quarantine went down by 1,744 to 26,760 now.
The state’s containment zones decreased from 3,654 to 3,510 on Monday while 17,895 health teams have fanned out around the state to survey a population of around 66.84 lakh till date.
