Active cases require medical attention, so a reduction in active cases reduces the burden on the health apparatus.

Active Covid cases in India have come down from a high of 10.17 lakh on September 17, to 9.66 lakh now. For the spread of an epidemic, only the active cases matter, because they are the ones who transmit the disease to others. Also, only active cases require medical attention, so a reduction in active cases reduces the burden on the health apparatus.

In an epidemic such as this, a clear trend of recoveries exceeding new infections is keenly awaited, because it can be read as signalling a slowing spread. These are still very early days — the trend has to hold for several weeks to convey something more meaningful — but the fact that it has begun brings hope.

What’s more, the reproduction number, or R, a key epidemiological metric that indicates how fast the disease is spreading in a population, has fallen below 1 for the first time since the pandemic began in India in the first week of March. R-value is a measure of the number of people who are being infected on average by an already infected person. A value less than 1 means fewer people are getting the infection than those who are carrying the disease right now.