After two years, has Visakhapatnam learnt to live with COVID?

Lowering the guard as the cases come down is worrisome, say senior doctors

On March 17, 2020, the first patient with COVID-19 symptoms, a Dubai returnee and resident of Alipuram, was admitted to a hospital. Two days later, his samples turned positive and the 65-year-old was declared as the first COVID-19 case in the city. Thankfully, he recovered and was tested negative after undergoing treatment for about 20 days in a hospital.

It has been two years since the virus had started to spread its tentacles in the city and from milder versions it has seen the devastating effects of the second wave.

After seeing a rapid increase during the third wave, which was a combination of the Delta variant and the Omicron, from January first week to February first week, cases started to drop from the second week of February.

“As of now we are in a comfortable position with the cases dropping to single digits since the first week of March and we can say that the wave has tapered down and is nearing normalcy,” said a senior doctor from King George Hospital.

As on Monday, the number of cases recorded in the district was only two and the active cases have dropped to 33, which was hovering around 12,000 in the last week of January.

Since the outbreak of the virus in March 2020, the total cases recorded in the district, as on Monday morning, are around 1.90 lakh and the recoveries are 1.89 lakh. The total deaths recorded are 1,184.

Though the number of cases was high, the severity and transmissibility was a tad lower in the first wave than the second wave. The first wave lasted from March 2020 to February 2021, with the wave peaking in the months of July and August. It started to taper down from September and the curve started to flatten from November 2020. The number of cases recorded during the first wave was around 50,000, with July and August contributing close to 30,000 cases. The death toll during the first wave was around 500.