Uttar Pradesh on Thursday reported 654 fresh cases of novel Coronavirus cases within the last 24 hours.
The maximum number of COVID-19 cases in Uttar Pradesh within the last 24 hours is from Noida which reported 143 cases followed by 84 cases in Ghaziabad and 34 cases in Lucknow.
Around 533 COVID-19 patients are declared recovered and discharged from the hospital within the last 24 hours. With this, the overall number of discharged cases rose to 13,119.
A total of 611 coronavirus-related deaths have taken place in Uttar Pradesh thus far including 15 new deaths, consistent with the data given by the State health department.
Uttar Pradesh is now pulsing with 6,463 active cases of Coronavirus.
Noida remains the worst-hit region accounting for 763 active cases of Coronavirus, followed by Ghaziabad with 575, Lucknow counts 401, Kanpur 345, and 247 in Meerut district.
Meanwhile, Delhi appears to have made a huge leap in testing. After weeks of barely increasing daily tests, the Capital seems to have doubled the count of tests it had been conducting every day in precisely four days.
Between June 18 and 21, Delhi appears to have tested around the same number of individuals as within the previous 10 days, conducting 13,000-18,000 tests every day. In the previous 10 days, it had been conducting 6,500 tests a day on a mean.
This was surprising, considering the criticism Delhi was facing for not scaling up testing enough, despite a steep rise in cases. But owing to the increased testing, Delhi’s test positivity rate (TPR), which was steeping, now appears to have flattened simultaneously, and thus the positivity rate of recent cases appears to be sliding down over a previous couple of days.
Delhi’s TPR has hovered around the 15-16% mark over the past week, and the positivity rate of the latest cases has declined from 37% on June 13 to 16% on June 21.
Although quick, inexpensive, and simple to rescale, rapid antigen tests are far less accurate than the standard RT-PCR tests. Delhi has not yet said whether it's re-validating rapid antigen tests with an RT-PCR test.
Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh don't include antigen tests in the total testing count and use only RT-PCR data, while the Delhi government appeared to say in court that both were getting used.
Data produced by the Delhi government in high court shows the State conducted 15,000 tests on June 18, of which 7,000 were antigen tests and 8,000 RT-PCR, and on June 21, Delhi conducted 13,300 tests, among which 9,300 were antigen and 4,000 RT-PCR.