West Bengal: Covid-19 death tally dips below 30 after 3 weeks – Times of India

KOLKATA: The number of daily Covid casualties in Bengal has slid below 30 after hovering above the mark for close to a month. The number of affected has also dropped sharply during the period.
In late-January, the death figure had touched 37 in Bengal and often went into double-digits in Kolkata. While the number of affected has slid from 24,287 — the highest daily fresh cases recorded on January 9 — to just 767 on Friday, the number of casualties was 29 in Bengal on February 7. This is the first time it dropped below 30 since January 14 when the state had 28 deaths. The very next day, the casualty figure jumped to 39 and continued to hover between 30 and 37 for the next 25 days.

While Bengal recorded 28 deaths and Kolkata had seven casualties on February 7, the death figure again crossed the 30-mark the very next day, touching 32. It slid to 27 on Friday.
With the number of severe cases and hospital admissions sliding appreciably since mid-January, casualties will dwindle now, said Peerless Hospital microbiologist Bhaskar Narayan Chowdhury. “Hospitalizations were frequent till the middle of January when we received many severe cases, mostly due to comorbidities. A significant percentage of these patients have succumbed over the last 2-3 weeks, helping plateau the number of deaths. But that period has now ended,” said Chowdhury.
He added that apart from those with comorbidities, there were others who have had post-Covid complications and had to be re-hospitalized. Their deaths, too, had kept the casualty figure constant, said Chowdhury.
The number of deaths climbed slowly due to the long tail of the third wave that has refused to stop wagging completely even after a sharp fall from peak, said RN Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences (RTIICS) intensivist Sauren Panja. “With schools and colleges now opening up and social gatherings allowed with 75% attendance, there could be another minor spurt in transmission and deaths. But they shouldn’t be major ones and will settle down quickly,” said Panja.
Rather than Omicron, stray Delta and Delta Plus cases were responsible for severe cases and deaths during the third wave, said experts. “We had sent a batch of samples for testing at the beginning of the third wave and a vast majority of them turned out to be Omicron. While these were mild, the stray Delta cases continued to strike and they resulted in severe cases, ICU admissions and deaths in a number of cases,” said Peerless Hospital CEO Sudipta Mitra.
The number of casualties usually start dipping after a two-week plateau, said Institute of Post-Graduate Medical Education & Research (IPGME&R) professor Diptendra Sarkar. “First, the number of cases started sliding, which had happened in the last week of January. Deaths had started climbing nearly a fortnight after the number of cases started rising in late-December. They have started sliding after a gap of a fortnight as well,” said Sarkar.
A few Covid deaths, however, will continue for several more months, added Sarkar. “Stray cases and deaths will persist till the virus is wiped out,” he said.