NEW DELHI, July 25 (Xinhua) -- After days of reporting over 20,000 new cases a day, India's daily caseload on Monday slipped to 16,866, officials said.
According to federal health ministry data released on Monday morning, 16,866 new cases of COVID-19 were reported during the past 24 hours, taking the total tally to 43,905,621 in the country.
The cases reported on Monday mark a decrease in comparison to the daily caseload of Sunday (20,279).
With the reporting of fresh cases, India's active caseload currently stands at 150,877.
The country also logged 41 related deaths during this period, which has pushed the overall death toll to 526,074 since the beginning of the pandemic, the ministry said.
With the increase in cases, the daily positivity rate has risen to 7.03 percent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded 4.49 percent, the ministry data showed.
The ministry said so far 43,228,670 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals, of whom 18,148 were discharged during the past 24 hours.
According to the federal health ministry, the cumulative COVID-19 vaccination coverage in the country has exceeded 2 billion doses and until Monday morning 2,021,766,615 doses were administered.
So far over 872 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.
A cumulative total of 872,759,815 samples had been tested up to July 24, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said Monday. Out of these 239,751 tests were conducted on Sunday alone.
Recently the Indian government stated an estimated 40 million eligible beneficiaries in the country have not taken even a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine.
At present the Indian government is focussing on promoting booster doses as the uptake for the third dose has been low. According to officials, the exercise is aimed at improving the booster dose coverage among the people in wake of the detection of new variants.
Local governments in various states have issued advisories urging people to wear facemasks and follow COVID-19 protocols in mass gatherings in the wake of an increase in daily infections.
Last week the federal government in the Indian parliament said given the emergence of COVID-19 variants with variable transmissibility and other public health implications, the health ministry was closely following the COVID-19 trajectory globally and in the country. ■
