Covid-19 recoveries in Bangalore

Something seems off in terms of the Covid-19 statistics for Bangalore. The number of “active cases” just don’t seem to be going down in line with the drop in the number of new cases. It seems like we’re not counting “recoveries” like we used to.

Active covid-19 cases in Bangalore in the second wave

In terms of active cases, covid-19 cases in Bangalore peaked in the middle of May. And then active cases started dropping rapidly. It seemed (when I ran this analysis towards the end of June) that active cases would drop well below 50,000 in the middle of June. However, as the graph shows, that hasn’t happened. The reduction in active cases has come down to a trickle.

Now it might well be that the way down is more gradual than the way up, but the thing is that the drop in active cases doesn’t square at all with the number of daily cases.

One metric we can look at is – how many days back do we have to go (in terms of newly infected cases) to get the current number of active cases? This is not correct – it assumes that infection is “first in first out” – but a good enough assumption for our analysis.

I’m writing this on 20th of June. As of today, there are 71000 odd active cases in Bangalore. And we have to go back 26 days to total up 71000 NEW INFECTIONS (assuming none of these people have died). This means that the average recovery period is far more than 26 days.

It wasn’t like this. I graphed this (I’m apologising for using a weird metric here. I thought of dividing active cases by new cases but thought that’s less accurate than this).

At the beginning of June, the number of active cases was equal to the number of new cases in the preceding 18 days. And notice that through June that number has gone up steadily. For whatever reason, the number of days after which a patient is considered “recovered” has been going up. It seems like we’re not counting the recoveries like we used to earlier.

I don’t know why we are doing this.

For the record, if the number of active cases has continued to be in the range of the number of new cases in the preceding 18 days, then we would have about 35,000 active cases in Bangalore right now. That is half the official number of active cases right now.

Again – I’m indulging in curve-fitting of some kind. Just that the data doesn’t tally.

PS: All data in this post from the brilliant covid19india.org .

One thought on “Covid-19 recoveries in Bangalore”

  1. I had noticed the same trend in Chennai at the middle of the covid wave where recoveries were tracking infections to the point of having low actuve adds, then one day the number of recoveries fell (https://www.covid19india.org/state/TN – 9th may is the cutoff)

    My idle speculation at that time was that since the central government was allocating resources by number of active cases, delaying recoveries was an easy way to increase active cases and lay claim to more covid resources like remdesivir and oxygen. Anyway it was just idle speculation then. Dont know why it is persisting even now.

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