Is Delhi headed for a 4th Covid-19 wave? Here's what health experts said

PTI while also advising caution and stressing on continued surveillance. "Merely counting cases has no meaning... though cases are rising in Delhi, hospital admission remains unchanged or marginally changed," he said. "SARS CoV-2 is going to stay with us for a long time and therefore, there is not going to be any period when the new cases would be zero," he said.

Delhi's Covid-19 positivity rate on Monday jumped to 7.72% with 501 fresh cases, according to health department data. The last time the positivity rate was above seven per cent in the city was on January 29 (7.4%) and on January 28 (8.6%), officials said.

This is in sharp contrast to India's overall positivity rate of 0.31% recorded by the Union health ministry on Tuesday when 1,247 coronavirus infections were reported.

US-based Infectious disease expert Amita Gupta noted that the rise in cases in Delhi and some other states may be a result of looser restrictions, pandemic fatigue, and higher transmissibility of the virus. "We anticipate this will not result in a major increase in severe cases requiring hospitalisation as this is not what we are seeing elsewhere despite the increased transmissibility," Gupta, chief of the division of infectious disease and professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told PTI. "It really helps that India has done an incredible job in vaccinating its population and now it is important to continue to do this and to administer the booster shots to those who are eligible," she added. "The BA.2 subvariant of Omicron appears to be more able to evade immunity to cause infections but is also less lethal possibly because of existing immunity from prior infection and vaccination," he said.