New Covid-19 cases in the country went up by close to 70,000 but around 58,000 people recovered and 977 succumbed to their infection, pushing up the active infections in the country to 6,86,395 over the last 24 hours.

The total confirmed cases in India moved up to 28.37 lakh of which nearly 21 lakh have already recovered. The Covid-19 death toll in the country as on Thursday was 53,866. With the increasing number of tests being conducted, the case fatality rate came down to 1.9 per cent and doubling time has increased to 34.2 days.

Over the last 24 hours, Covid-19 testing centres across the country carried out more than 9.19 lakh tests, taking the total tests since the beginning to close to 3.27 crore so far.