Data | COVID-19 cases rising in the north-eastern States

In States with a higher vaccination rate, the case fatality rate is either lower or decreasing

While the second wave of COVID-19 is going down in the rest of India, . The Delta variant is responsible for the majority of the cases in six of the eight northeastern States. The surge is despite the fact that a majority of the tests in the region are conducted using the Rapid Antigen Detection Tests (RADT), which are not as reliable as the RT-PCR tests, considered the “gold standard” of testing. Worryingly, the cumulative case fatality rate (CFR: deaths/cases) is high in Manipur and Meghalaya and is rising in Nagaland and Assam. These are the four States with poor vaccination rates in the region. The first map shows the biweekly growth rate in new confirmed COVID-19 cases on July 19, 2021. The second map shows the share of COVID-19 sequences that are of the Delta variant on July 5, 2021. Finally, the bar graph shows the % of RADTs among all COVID-19 tests conducted in July across the north-eastern States with such data.