Introduction

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) started releasing a detailed daily PDF containing information on a variety of indicators such as mortality, containment zones, bed capacity, vaccinations, etc. from June 2020. Such data is useful not only for formulating short-term policies but also for assisting longer-term academic research. A long-standing issue with using the data, however, has been that the authorities replace the PDF each day with fresh information and remove the prior day’s document. This practice has limited any kind of temporal analysis till now.

At IDFC Institute, we have been able to gather all such PDFs from June 2020 until the present. We are in the process of converting all relevant indicators to a machine-readable output and will put them out as a public-facing database in due course. In the meantime, we will put out a brief analysis of them along with the related datasets.

Case Fatality Rate Analysis

The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is the proportion of people who died due to COVID-19 among all the positive cases over a certain period. We have considered a two-week lag between COVID-19 infection and mortality to compute the CFR. Analysing trends in CFR can help to understand the severity of COVID-19 at different time intervals, identify high-risk populations and evaluate the quality of healthcare in a country. 

The gaps in the line representing the CFR for Mumbai account for missing data in the report. Additional gaps account for missing CFR data due to the two-week lag considered between infection and mortality.

In line with global evidence, the CFR is higher in older age groups. The highest CFR has been observed for people above the age of 80 during both waves. This is the reason people over the age of 60 were initially prioritized during the vaccination campaign. 

The CFR for all age groups has reduced significantly since the beginning of the pandemic. This can be attributed to better clinical management, vaccination, increased testing and early detection of positive cases. 

A downward trend in CFR can be observed for both Mumbai and Delhi – except for a slight bump in Delhi during the second wave. However, the CFR for Mumbai is higher than the CFR for Delhi since the start of the pandemic. On 13 June 2020, the CFR of Mumbai was 7.83% whereas the CFR for Delhi was 6.73%. On 9 June 2021, the CFR for Mumbai was 2.28% and the CFR for Delhi was 1.74%. Further studies are necessary to understand the difference in CFR between both cities.

Age Profile of Positive Cases

As of 9 June 2021, 679,817 cases have been recorded in Mumbai. The highest number of cases has been recorded for the age group 30-39. The overall number of positive cases recorded for the working population i.e. people between the ages 20 and 60 is very high.

The second wave of COVID-19 has been virulent and there was an unprecedented increase in the number of cases. The number of infected children almost doubled from 691 cases to 1,163 cases. However, the proportion of youngsters getting infected has reduced by more than 50%.  During the first wave, 14,573 cases were recorded during the peak period (7 days total) – of which 4.74% were in the age group 0 to 10 years. During the second wave, this share reduced to 1.83%. A nearly equal proportion of cases was recorded in the working population during both waves in Mumbai.  The age group of 20 to 40 years accounted for 36% of the total cases during the first wave and 39% of the total cases during the second wave. Similarly, the age group of 40 to 60 years accounted for 34% of the total cases during the first wave and 33% of the total  cases during the second wave.

Gender Profile of Positive Cases

 

 

According to the data, more males are getting infected with COVID-19 as compared to females in Mumbai. As of 9 June 2021, 67,9817 cases were reported- of which 60% were males (410,507 cases) and 40% females (269,310 cases). The trend of cases by gender has remained the same for both waves.

Click here to view and download the data. All data provided as-is from BMC’s COVID-19 response War Room Dashboard and may contain errors or be incomplete.

Disclaimer : All visualizations are based on the age-wise totals available in the report as of 9 June 2021.

This work was done by the author/s when they were a part of the IDFC Institute and is republished here with permission.