It seems the worst of the third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic is behind us, as new cases in the state fell sharply for the third consecutive day, according to health department data.
Separately, the Gujarat government announced that offline teaching would resume in the state for classes 1 to 9 from Monday, February 9. The decision comes in the wake of decline in Covid-19 cases.
The state reported 4,710 Covid-19 cases on Saturday, nearly 23% lower than 6,097 on Friday and 38% lower than Thursday’s tally of 7,606. Saturday’s cases are less than one-fifth of the all-time high of 24,485 cases reported on January 20.
Ahmedabad city reported 1,451 cases as against 1,985 a day earlier, followed by Vadodara city where cases fell to 781 from 1,215. With 242 and 231 cases respectively, Gandhinagar city and Vadodara rural were the only other places that reported over 200 cases. Ahmedabad rural reported 33 more cases.
Even as new cases have fallen sharply in the past couple of weeks, the state reported more than 30 Covid-related deaths for the ninth straight day on Saturday. Thirty-four more deaths took the pandemic’s official death toll to 10,648. Incidentally, the state government has received more than 1.02 lakh claims for Covid-19 compensation of which it has approved more than 87,000 claims.
Ahmedabad city reported seven Covid-19 deaths, followed by Vadodara city, Surat city and Bhavnagar rural with four each. Three deaths were reported in Jamnagar city, two each in Rajkot rural, Bharuch, and one each in Gandhinagar city, Mehsana, Rajkot city, Morbi, Bhavnagar city, Valsad, and Porbandar.
The active caseload of Covid-19 fell to just over 51,000 with 11,184 persons recovering. So far more than 11.34 lakh or 94.85% of patients have recovered from the Coronavirus.
The Covid-19 vaccination coverage crossed 9.95 crore with nearly 2.72 lakh more vaccines being administered in the state today.