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India's Covid-19 positivity rate declining, trend of less deaths seen: Govt
Officials said that India has inoculated at least 1.17 crore people — 1.04 crore have been administered first dose and 12.61 lakh second dose — across the country.
The Union health ministry on Tuesday said that India's cumulative positivity rate is on decline as mapped in the daily and weekly trend.
"The cumulative positivity rate is 5.19%. This is declining continuously. Positivity rate — cumulative as well as weekly and daily — is declining across the country," health ministry secretary Rajesh Bhushan said.
Bhushan also said that India has inoculated at least 1.17 crore people — 1.04 crore have been administered first dose and 12.61 lakh second dose — across the country.
"The active cases continue to be less than 1.50 lakh. If you look at the average of deaths taking place daily, it was 92 last week- a trend of less than 100 deaths," Bhushan said in a weekly press briefing.
Flagging the two areas of concern, the health ministry had last week singled out Kerala and Maharashtra as India's challenge in controlling the daily caseload. In continuation with that, the officials again highlighted the two states and said, "There are still 2 states that have 75% active cases -Kerala and Maharashtra. Kerala has 38% of the total active cases of the country while Maharashtra has 37% of the total active cases."
Karnataka has 4% and Tamil Nadu has 2.78% active cases, Bhushan said.
India has 194 people infected with three known strains first found in the UK, South Africa and Brazil, officials said.
"A total of 187 individuals have been reported infected with UK strain, six people with South African strain and one with Brazilian strain till date," Dr VK Paul, NITI Aayog's health member said.
He added that the two variants have been found in India's three states.
"There are two variants in Maharashtra being talked about - N440 K variant and E484 K variant. These variants have been reported in Maharashtra, Kerala and Telangana," Paul said.
The think-tank's health official said that the Covid-19 variants reported from other countries are not responsible for surge in Kerala and Maharashtra's tally.
"Based on the information available to us, yes these variants are there in the country. But there is no reason today for us to believe, on basis of scientific information, that these are responsible for upsurge of outbreak that you see in some districts of Maharashtra and Kerala," he said.
