People Aged 15-40 Years Account For Almost 60% Of Odisha's COVID-19 Tally!

Bhubaneswar: Amid concerns over a serious threat to the vulnerable groups, latest official data of the State Covid dashboard reveals that close to 60 per cent of the Covid-19 infected people in Odisha are between 15 years and 40 years.

As per the data available in the government portal, 1361 positives (5.1 per cent) belong to the age group 0-14 years while 1771 persons aged above 60 years who fall in the category of high-risk age group account for 6.9 per cent of the total cases.

In contrast, a whopping 15923 infected people belong to the 15-40 years age group, which is 59.2 per cent of the total positives, followed by 7837 patients aged 41-60 years accounting for 29.1 per cent of the total.

Reports suggest that those in the 15-60 age group are either office-goers, students or the ones stepping out of the house frequently with easing of lockdown restrictions; thereby risking the lives of people with co-morbidities.

Odisha Testing Numbers Falling

In what might look abysmal, the daily testing in Odisha has gone down drastically over the last two days. The number of samples tested on July 24 stood at 12,733; the testing count reduced to 11,809 on July 25 and it again came down to 9327 the next day.

Though Odisha's fatality rate of 0.5% is much below the national average (2.28%), the positivity rate (PR) of the State is growing with each passing day. While India's positivity rate stood around 10% on Monday, Odisha's PR jumped to as high as 16.1%. Even the State's recovery rate has come down to 64.6%, a little above the national cure rate which is progressively increasing.

Digest this now. Odisha reported first 10,000 cases in around 112 days and the next 16000-odd cases in less than 20 days. In view of the massive surge in Covid infections, the State government has now decided to increase the testing capacity to 15000 a day from August.

As far as India's numbers are considered, the national testing capacity looks much better. On July 26, 515472 samples were tested taking the cumulative testing count till date to 1,68,06,803.

Today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched three high throughput COVID testing facilities at Noida, Mumbai and Kolkata to ramp up testing capacity in the country and help strengthen early detection and treatment.

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