The deadly second wave of coronavirus seems to be ebbing and the national recovery rate is picking up. On Monday, the recovery rate stood at 93.94 per cent. In the last 24 hours, India had the least number of daily new cases in 61 days, with just over one lakh cases (1,00,636). There have been 1,74,399 recoveries in the last 24 hours and the case fatality rate is 1.20 per cent. For the 25th day in succession, the number of recoveries outnumbered new cases.
Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan, who chaired a meeting of the high-level group of ministers on Monday, said daily cases were on the decline and were outnumbered by recoveries, with 83 per cent of active cases being in 10 states and the remaining 17 per cent in 26 states/UTs. Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand have less than 1,000 cases.
In five state/UTs comprising Jammu, Punjab, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh, there are less than 2,000 cases. Even the most affected states, like Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have been recording a decline in the number of cases at a significant rate. Growth rate has declined from 14.7 per cent (May 5) to 3.48 per cent (June 7).
On the testing front, Dr Harsh Vardhan noted that “as of 7th June morning, we have conducted over 36.6 crore (36,63,34,111) tests so far and over 15 lakh tests yesterday (Sunday) despite it being a holiday. The labs for testing purposes have also gone up to 2,624. Daily positivity rate has also been declining and is at 6.34 per cent and even though this is less than 10 per cent positivity rate for 14 consecutive days, there still are 15 states where the daily positivity rate is greater than 10 per cent.”
According to the health minister, “INSACOG (Indian SARSCoV-2 Consortium on Genomics or Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genetics Consortium) sequencing labs are looking at the mutants which have significant potential of severely affecting the disease transmission. As of now, 10 national labs under INSACOG have sequenced around 30 thousand samples. 18 more labs have been added to the consortium recently to boost the capacity of sequencing.”
The minister hailed the collaboration between the Centre and the states in flagging the emerging cases of mucormycosis. So far, 28,252 cases have been reported from 28 states. Of these, 86 per cent (24,370 cases) have a history of Covid-19 infection and 62.3 per cent (17,601) have a history of diabetes. Maharashtra has reported the maximum number of mucormycosis cases (6,339) followed by Gujarat (5,486).
As far as vaccination was concerned, Dr Harsh Vardhan said until Monday morning, 23,27,86,482 had been vaccinated in various categories. Talking specifically about the 18-44 age group, the first dose had been given to 2,86,18,514 people. As on Monday, states had over 1.4 crore doses still available. Talking about other categories, he noted that first doses had been administered to 6,06,75,796 people in the 60+ category and 7,10,44,966 in the 45-59 age group.