MUMBAI: The state has added an average of 600 unreported Covid-19 deaths every day for the past 40 days as part of reconciliation.
The count of ‘reconciled’ deaths has crossed 25,000 since the exercise was started on May 17.
Maharashtra’s overall Covid fatality now stands at 1,21,286 while the cumulative tally of positive cases is 60,36,821.
On Sunday, for the fourth day in a row, the state has added less than 10,000 cases.
A total of 9,974 cases were detected, of which the highest (1,485) were reported from Kolhapur district followed by Sangli (1,205).
It was almost double the number of fresh infections reported by bigger cities like Mumbai and Pune.
Although marginal, daily detections in the state has shown an increase every day for the last three days.
From 9,677 new cases on Friday, it increased to 9,812 on Saturday and 9,974 on Sunday.
In terms of ‘new’ fatalities, the state has been reporting less than 200 deaths now daily.
So much so that, of the 25,942 Covid deaths added by the state in June, 7,069 were current deaths while 18,873 were reconciled.
Mumbai once again reported more than 700 (729) cases on Sunday after showing a marginal dip for the past two days — 693 on Friday and 648 on Saturday.
The city for the past one month has reported an average of 700 cases daily, although a steady drop in fatalities has been seen.
Mumbai’s cumulative tally has now reached 7,20,349 while deaths have touched 12,646.
Additional municipal commissioner said the city’s daily positivity rate is hovering around 2% and testing has been enhanced.
Kolhapur is not just contributing to cases but also deaths.
Of the 143 deaths reported by the state on Sunday, 35 deaths were from Kolhapur.
In comparison, Mumbai and Pune had reported 13 deaths each, while Nashik district had reported a dozen deaths.
Other districts, like Ahmednagar, are adding nearly 400 cases but are reporting deaths in single digits.
Dr Anil Mali, civic surgeon of Kolhapur, said that the cases are still being detected in big numbers from the peri-urban and rural areas of the state.
About presence of variants that could be driving the surge, he said several samples have been sent for genome sequencing, but they haven’t been informed of any variants so far.
“We are carrying out nearly 25,000 to 30,000 tests daily and seeing a positivity rate of around 9%.
Since we are doing more tests, we could be picking up more cases,” he added.
A total of 8,562 people were discharged from hospitals and home isolation, taking the count of discharges to 57,90,113.