By Asmau Ahmad
India’s daily COVID-19 caseload on Monday dropped below the 10,000 marks, officials said.
According to federal health ministry data released on Monday morning, 9,531 new cases of COVID-19 were reported during the past 24 hours, taking the total tally to 44,348,960 in the country.
The cases reported on Monday marked a decrease in comparison to the daily caseload of Sunday 11,539.
With the reporting of fresh cases, India’s active caseload currently stands at 97,648.
The country also logged 36 related deaths during the past 24 hours, pushing the overall death toll to 527,368 since the beginning of the pandemic, the ministry said.
With the increase in cases, the daily positivity rate stands at 4.15 per cent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded 3.59 per cent, the ministry data showed.
The ministry said so far 43,723,944 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals, of whom 11,726 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 Monday morning 2,100,240,361 doses were administered.
A cumulative total of 882,725,509 samples have been tested up to Aug. 21, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said Monday.
Out of these 229,546 tests were conducted on Sunday alone.
Health experts said COVID-19 was a cyclical disease and would come in waves.
In the wake of the detection of new variants, at present the Indian government was focusing on improving booster dose coverage as the uptake for the third dose has been low.
Health officials attribute the surge in new cases to people letting their guard down and not following social distancing norms.
