India's daily COVID-19 caseload rises to 21,566

NEW DELHI, July 21: India's daily COVID-19 caseload on Thursday breached the 21,000 mark, officials said.

According to federal health ministry data released Thursday morning, 21,566 new cases of COVID-19 were reported during the past 24 hours, taking the total tally to 43,825,185 in the country.

With the reporting of fresh cases, India's active caseload currently stands at 148,881.

The country also logged 45 related deaths during this period, which has pushed the overall death toll to 525,870 since the beginning of the pandemic, the ministry said.

The daily positivity rate has risen to 4.25 percent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded at 4.51 percent, the ministry data showed.

The ministry said so far 43,150,434 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals, of whom 18,294 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 on Sunday and until Thursday morning, 2,009,191,969 doses were administered.

The Indian government is presently focusing on promoting booster doses as the uptake for the third dose has been low. The drive to provide free booster doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to all adults at government centers has begun last week.

According to officials, the exercise is aimed at improving the booster dose coverage among the people in wake of the detection of new variants.

A super-transmissible subvariant of the omicron strain, known as BA.5, is fueling a fresh increase in infections, and a super contagious omicron mutant (BA.2.75) that has begun to gain ground in the country has worried health officials, which may be able to spread rapidly and get around immunity from vaccines and previous infections.

Meanwhile, so far over 871 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.

A cumulative total of 871,160,846 samples have been tested up to July 20, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said Thursday. Out of these 507,360 tests were conducted on Wednesday alone.