India / Delhi becomes first state or UT in India to cross 90% coronavirus recovery rate

New Delhi: India coronavirus cases: Delhi has become the first state to cross the 90 per cent recovery rate of novel Coronavirus patients. More than 1.46 lakh people out of the 1.62 lakh infected so far have been declared to have recovered.

There are three states, Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Haryana, where the recovery rate is more than 80 per cent, while another 13 have recovery rate more than 70 per cent.

An increase in recovery rate is often cited as some sort of positive indicator, when in fact, it describes nothing more than a natural, and obvious, progression of the epidemic. At the start of the pandemic, the recovery rate is very low, because people are still to start recovering. But as the epidemic progresses, more and more people recover, and only the recently-infected ones remain sick. Eventually, when the epidemic will end, everyone, apart from those who have succumbed to the disease, would have recovered.

Considering that less than one per cent of infected people are expected to be among the dead, the recovery rate at the end of the epidemic would be more than 99 per cent, or somewhere close to that.

In the meanwhile, the recovery rates would continue to increase. The speed at which this increase happens depends on whether the state is currently experiencing a surge in infections, or its most active phase is already behind it.

For the country as a whole, the recovery rate has crossed 76.3 per cent, with more than 24.67 lakh people out of the 32.34 lakh, who have so far been detected to have been infected, having recovered.