While India has been recording 20,000 new Covid-19 cases on an average and the Covid-19 graph seems to be plateauing, the challenge has not ended yet, said Lav Agarwal, joint secretary of Union health ministry, on Thursday.
“On an average, 20,000 Covid cases have been recorded daily. Of these 56% cases were reported from Kerala last week,” said Agarwal.
“Overall positivity rate of the country was nearly at 1.68% last week as compared to that of 5.86% earlier,” he added.
He informed that five states – Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Mizoram and Karnataka – have over 10,000 active Covid-19 cases at the moment. Kerala alone has over 1 lakh active Covid-19 cases currently.
As many as 34 districts across nine states and UTs reporting a weekly positivity rate of more than 10%. Further, 28 districts across 12 states and UTs are reporting a weekly positivity rate between 5 and 10%.
Due to this, Agarwal said: “The challenge of Covid has not ended yet. To some extent, we say that we have not controlled the second wave of Covid. We need to make continuous efforts.”
“We need to be watchful of the months of October, November and December. We need to be alert,” he added.
This comes even as the total active cases across the country have declined to 2,44,198, the lowest in 204 days.
With 22,431 people testing positive for coronavirus infection in a day, India's total tally of Covid-19 has risen to 3,38,94,312. The death toll climbed to 4,49,856 with 318 fresh fatalities, according to the health ministry data.
The daily rise in new coronavirus infections has been below 30,000 for 13 straight days.
The active cases comprise 0.72% of the total infections, the lowest since March 2020, while the national Covid-19 recovery rate was recorded at 97.95%, the highest since March 2020.
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