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India adds 2,539 new Covid-19 cases, 60 more deaths in last 24 hrs
Covid-19 cases in India: The country's total caseload is over 4.3 crore and the active cases have further declined to 30,799.
India's daily Covid-19 tally saw a slight decline on Thursday after 2,539 new cases were recorded in the last 24 hours. Sixty more patients succumbed to the viral disease and nearly 4,500 recuperated.
The total caseload has now climbed to more than 4.3 crore including over 5.16 lakh deaths and over 4.24 crore recoveries, the Union health ministry's dashboard showed.
The active cases in India are further down to 30,799 and constitute 0.08 per cent of the caseload. The overall recovery rate has slightly risen to 98.73 per cent, the health ministry also said.
On the other hand, the daily and weekly positivity rates in the country are at 0.35 per cent and 0.42 per cent respectively.
On Wednesday, the country had recorded 2,876 cases, 98 deaths and 3,884 recoveries.
According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), more than 7.17 lakh samples were tested for Covid-19 in the last 24 hours. The total figure has climbed to over 78.12 crore.
Even though the pandemic situation has been improving in India, health minister Mansukh Mandaviya ordered officials to maintain a high level of alertness, conduct aggressive genome sequencing, and intensify virus surveillance amid a surge in infections in Europe, China and Southeast Asia.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said that the global surge in cases can be attributed to several factors including the lifting of public health and social measures, the highly transmissible Omicron variant and its BA.2 sublineage and low vaccination rates.
"These increases are occurring despite reductions in testing in some countries, which means the cases we're seeing are just the tip of the iceberg," WHO's head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press briefing on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, on the vaccination front in India, over 180.80 crore doses have been administered to eligible beneficiaries till now. On Wednesday, vaccination opened for children in the 12-14 years age group, with more than 2.6 lakh doses administered on day 1.
