After reporting a significant drop in the number of Covid-19 cases for months, some Indian states have seen a sharp uptick in infections in February. The BBC’s Vikas Pandey and Soutik Biswas report.

In early February, physicians in Amravati district, some 700km (435 miles) from India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, noticed a sudden surge in the number of people suffering from Covid-19.

Life in this cotton-growing district in the western state of Maharashtra had almost returned to normal after the first wave of infections last summer. The ICUs of the 1,600-bed state-run hospital and half-a-dozen private hospitals were nearly empty.

“But everything changed in February,” says Anil Jadhav, a local journalist. “And now there’s panic in the district.”

Since the beginning of February, Amravati has recorded more than 10,000 cases and over 66 deaths from Covid. More than 1,000 were receiving treatment for the disease this week. The positivity rate is in frightful double digits. Amravati and a few other districts in Maharashtra have been again locked down.

The hotspots in a district of 2.5 million people are mainly congested urban areas, say locals.

“We really don’t know what the cause of the surge is. What is worrying is that entire families are getting infected. This is a completely new trend,” Dr Shyamsunder Nikam, civil surgeon of the district, says.

A number of neighbouring districts have also seen a sharp uptick in cases and Maharashtra recorded nearly 9,000 cases on Thursday, the largest single-day spike in four months. It reported 80 deaths on the same day.