| Good morning! The crime, the Covid, the politics and the potholes: Capital Letters — Keeping track of Delhi's week, one beat at a time, through the eyes and words of HT's My Delhi section, with all the perspective, context and analysis you need. Hello Covid, our old friend. We've come to talk about you again. And it's been a while, hasn't it? The pandemic had taken a backseat for a few months, slowly crawling off news space as well. The wars, the economy and the communal tensions helped keep it on the side-lines. But now, it's feeling left out. Has absence made the heart grow fonder? Not one bit. Cases in Delhi have started to tick up over the past 10 days or so, even with average daily testing at its lowest in several months. The test positivity rate too, as a result, has crept up, and stayed over the 1% mark for 13 days now. But the question is – is this the preamble to a surge, and how worried should we be? To the first, we don't really know. The seven-day average of new cases more than doubled from 106 at the start of the month to 233 on April 15, while the average test positivity rate went from 0.47% to 2.30% in the same time. But, there's a laundry list of caveats. First, Covid-19 hospitalisations are still extremely low. As you read this, 99.5% of all hospital beds reserved for coronavirus patients are vacant. This is despite the state government over the past couple of months winding down its hospitalisation capacity, as fresh infections flatlined. Take this a step ahead – at no point during the peak of the Omicron wave this January did hospital admissions cross even 20% of the overall bed count. This is important because Omicron continues to be the dominant variant of the coronavirus in Delhi (and indeed across the country). This brings us to the next caveat, since the XE sub-variant (not a variant) of the virus is in the news (and some of the panic around it may be quite premature): For one, just two cases of the sub-variant have been detected so far across the country so far, and daily infections in India continue to be at the lowest they have ever been. Further, there is still no evidence to show the sub-variant is any more dangerous than previous ones, especially since vaccination and past infection rates continue to be at record highs. Third, daily tests in Delhi are lower than they have been, but this indicates that the city's testing strategy is more focussed and targeted than before. Since testing requirements have been relaxed across avenues (to enter establishments, to work, at airports and so on), and owing to the milder symptoms caused by the Omicron variant, most people getting tested are those who absolutely need to get tested. This, in many ways, makes the test positivity rate (the percentage of tests that return positive results) less useful as a point of comparison with previous points of the pandemic, when many more people were getting tested, even when their health didn't necessarily merit it. The rise in cases means the Delhi government is likely to rethink the relaxation of mask norms (which many experts have said has resulted in slacker masking behaviour and may have a role in the ongoing uptick). But the state's general messaging at this point is worth lending an ear to – don't panic. | 
