Number Theory: Kerala’s outbreak concerning, but it is not as bad as it looks
Kerala also has a Covid-19 mortality rate of 0.5%, the best of any major state in the country, and significantly better than the national average of 1.3%.
Over the past few weeks, Kerala has defied the national trend of falling Covid-19 infections. But it’s the volume of the outbreak in the southern state that is worrying. As of Saturday night, the state has 165,011 active cases, accounting for 40% of all such cases in the country. In the past week, India has reported 40,459 new infections of Covid-19 every single day on average. Kerala alone has been responsible for around 19,528 of these daily new cases, or about 48% of the national tally. Only once before has any state been responsible for a larger share of the national infection count — Maharashtra, for a month-and-a-half period at the very start of India’s brutal second wave. The average weekly positivity rate — proportion of samples that return positive among total tested, generally indicative of the spread of the infection within the community — currently stands at 12.3% in Kerala, over five times that of the national average of 2.4% in the same period. There is no denying that the state is currently the biggest virus hot spot in the country. But Kerala has handled the outbreak far better than what purely looking at infection numbers in isolation appears to suggest right now. Here is why.
