India’s COVID-19 Daily Caseload Comes Down To 16,935

After four straight days of reporting over 20,000 new cases a day, India’s COVID-19 daily caseload on Monday came down to 16,935, officials said.

According to health ministry data released on Monday morning, 16,935 new cases of COVID-19 were reported during the past 24 hours, taking the total tally to 43,767,534 in the country, and the active caseload currently stands at 144,264.

India also logged 51 COVID-19-related deaths during this period, which has pushed the overall death toll to 525,760 since the beginning of the pandemic, the ministry said.

With the increase in cases, the daily positivity rate stood at 6.48 percent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded 4.58 percent, the ministry data showed.

The ministry said 43,097,510 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals, of whom 16,069 were discharged during the past 24 hours.

According to the health ministry, the cumulative COVID-19 vaccination coverage in the country exceeded 2 billion doses as 2,000,461,095 doses have been administered until Monday morning.

The detection of a highly contagious Omicron mutant, BA.2.75, has begun to gain ground in India. There are fears that the new mutant may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infections.

The Indian government has focused on promoting booster doses as the uptake for the third dose has been low. The drive to provide free booster doses of COVID-19 vaccine to all adults at government centers began on Friday.

Meanwhile, so far over 869 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.

Out of these 261,470 tests were conducted during the past 24 hours, the health ministry said.