India continues to witness a decline in the number of daily cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19). On Tuesday, the country recorded 55,342 new infections, the lowest in nearly two months, according to figures released by the ministry of health and family welfare.
Earlier in the day, the ministry said that India’s average daily Covid-19 cases have been declining for the past five weeks. “India is showing a trend of declining average daily cases over the past 5 weeks,” the ministry tweeted and shared a graph that showed the daily average figures from the week starting September 9.
The country’s total caseload has gone up to 7,175,880 with the maximum number of active cases coming from Maharashtra (2,21,637), followed by Karnataka (1,20,289), Andhra Pradesh (46,295) and Tamil Nadu (44,095). The active cases in the country that stood at 8,38,729 on Tuesday have remained below 9,00,000 since October 9 and have steadily maintained the downward trend, the ministry said.
Even as the toll from the disease has gone up to 1,09,856, recoveries continue to bind hopes as 6,227,295 people have recovered in home isolation or have been discharged from hospitals. The recovery rate is currently at 86.36 per cent.
As pharma firms across the globe are racing to come out with a vaccine against the disease, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said that the shot may be ready for registration by the end of 2020 or early next year at the earliest.
“As you know, we have about 40 vaccine candidates now in some stage of clinical trials, and 10 of them are in the phase three trials, which are the late-stage clinical trials, which will tell us about both the efficacy and the safety. So, the best we could make a guess or predict, looking at when a trial started and when it is likely to have enough data to submit to the regulators, is [at] earliest from December of 2020 into the early part of 2021,” WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.
Meanwhile, the global infection tally has surpassed 37 million and India is only second to the United States, which has 7,804,047 confirmed cases.
