NEW DELHI, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) -- India's daily COVID-19 caseload slipped to 8,813 on Tuesday, officials said.
According to federal health ministry data released on Tuesday morning, 8,813 new cases of COVID-19 were reported during the past 24 hours, taking the total tally to 44,277,194 in the country.
The cases reported on Tuesday mark a sharp decline in comparison to the daily caseload of 14,917 reported on Monday.
With the reporting of fresh cases, India's active caseload currently stands at 111,252.
The country also logged 29 related deaths during the past 24 hours, pushing the overall death toll to 527,098 since the beginning of the pandemic, the ministry said.
With the increase in cases, the daily positivity rate stands at 4.15 percent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded 4.79 percent, the ministry data showed.
The ministry said so far 43,638,844 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals, of whom 15,040 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 Tuesday morning 2,083,124,694 doses were administered.
So far over 880 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.
A cumulative total of 880,692,503 samples have been tested up to August 15, the health ministry said Tuesday. Out of these 212,129 tests were conducted on Monday alone.
Health experts say COVID-19 is a cyclical disease and will come in waves.
On Monday, head of Serum Institute of India Adar Poonawalla told a local news channel that the institute was working on an Omicron-specific vaccine with Novavax. According to Poonawalla, the vaccine will be specific to the BA.5 sub-variant of Omicron and can be expected within six months.
Amid an increase of daily new cases, the local governments in New Delhi and neighboring state of Punjab have made wearing face masks in public places mandatory and asked officials to enforce the order by imposing fines on violators.
In the wake of the detection of new variants, the Indian government is focusing on improving booster dose coverage as the uptake for the third dose has been low.
Health officials attributed the surge in new cases to people letting their guard down and not following social distancing norms. ■