NEW DELHI, July 31 (Xinhua) -- After three straight days of reporting over 20,000 new cases a day, India's daily caseload Sunday came down to 19,673, officials said.
According to federal health ministry data released on Sunday morning, 19,673 new cases of COVID-19 were reported during the past 24 hours, taking the total tally to 44,019,811 in the country.
With the reporting of fresh cases, India's active caseload currently stands at 143,676.
The country also logged 45 related deaths during the past 24 hours, pushing the overall death toll to 526,357 since the beginning of the pandemic, the ministry said.
With the increase in cases, the daily positivity rate stands at 4.96 percent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded at 4.88 percent, the ministry data showed.
The ministry said so far 43,349,778 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals, of whom 19,336 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 Sunday morning 2,042,569,509 doses were administered.
So far over 875 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.
A cumulative total of 875,207,621 samples have been tested up to July 30, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said Sunday. Out of these, 396,424 tests were conducted on Saturday alone.
Recently, the Indian government estimated that 40 million eligible beneficiaries in the country have not taken even a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
At present, the 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.
No new variant of concern of COVID-19 has been detected in the country since Omicron in the first week of December 2021, the government said on Friday, adding, however, various Omicron sub-lineages are circulating across all states with the clinical presentation remaining largely the same.
The government also stated COVID-19 infections among children and adolescents typically cause less severe illness as compared to adults, according to the WHO.
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.
Local governments in various states have issued advisories urging people to wear face masks and follow COVID-19 protocols in mass gatherings in the wake of an increase in daily infections. ■
