India recorded 57,981 cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and 941 deaths in the last 24 hours, pushing its tally to over 2.64 million, data from the Union health ministry showed on Monday.
There are 676,900 active Covid-19 cases and 50,921 people have succumbed to the viral disease across the country, the health ministry’s data showed at 8am. The country’s death toll stands at 50,921.
At 1.93%, India had one of the lowest mortality globally as of Sunday, according to the government. The United States crossed 50,000 deaths in 23 days, Brazil in 95 days and Mexico in 141 days. India took 156 days to reach the figure, it said.
The recovery rate went up to 72.51% as 1,919,842 patients, 57,584 in the last 24 hours, have been cured so far.
“Successful implementation of TESTING aggressively, TRACKING comprehensively & TREATING efficiently through a plethora of measures have contributed to the existing high level of recoveries as well,” the health ministry said in a release on Sunday.
India is moving towards completing 30 million tests with 2,93,09,703 samples tested as of Sunday. “This has been made possible by a rapidly growing national network of diagnostic labs which comprises 969 labs in the government sector and 500 private labs, adding up to 1469,” the ministry added.
Sero surveys conducted in select districts by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) and state governments have detected high antibody positivity rates among the population in cities such as Mumbai and Delhi and low rates in primarily rural states such as Bihar, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
State government officials have said that in Mumbai, the positivity rate was 57% in three slums; it was 0.7% in six districts of Bihar and 0.5% in three districts of Chhattisgarh, according to .
These surveys detect how many people have developed immunoglobulin (IgG) antibodies to the coronavirus disease and to gauge the extent of infection through random sampling. And, the high positivity rates signal a lower risk of reinfection, and conversely, they should worry the states in the hinterland where cases are beginning to spike.
There are 21.6 million people who have been infected by Sars-Cov-2, the virus which causes the coronavirus disease, and 774,296 have died across the globe, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tracker. The US with 5,403,213 cases and Brazil with 3,340,197 have more Covid-19 cases than India, the Baltimore-based university’s tracker showed.
