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COVID: India reports highest new daily cases of February

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Fresh Covid-19 cases are showing a worrying upward trend over the past one week, with the country reporting single-day rise of 16,752 cases in the last 24 hours taking the overall tally to 1,10,96,731 on Sunday, Union Health Ministry said.

Fresh COVID-19 cases are showing a worrying upward trend over the past one week, with the country reporting single-day rise of 16,752 cases in the last 24 hours taking the overall tally to 1,10,96,731 on Sunday, Union Health Ministry said. The rise is the highest in this month. The positivity rate has been rising gradually, which is now at 1.48 per cent. As per the Ministry’s data, there are 1,64,511 active cases at present after 11,718 patients were discharged in a day.

Meanwhile, 113 more deaths were recorded in the last 24 hours, taking the overall toll to 1,57,051, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said. The experts have expressed a number of possibilit­ies which could be owed to the stride ranging from lax attitude of people towards following COVID protocols to likeabilit­y of “mutations and new strains” causing the surge, as has been studied by the laboratori­es involved in Covid detection across the country.

Last week, officials said that the average daily new infections for the last 15 days were oscillatin­g between 9,000 to 12,000 while the deaths were between 78 to 120. On February 9, India had reported 9,110 new cases, the lowest this year so far. Last year, the lowest 9,633 cases were recorded on June 3. Till now, 1,07,75,169 persons have been discharged so far. The recovery rate has reduced to 97.10 per cent, a change of 0.4 per cent in the last two days.

So far, 1,43,01,266 doses of corona vaccine have been administer­ed in the country since the drive began on January 16 after approval for ‘Covishield’ and ‘Covaxin’. As per the Union Health Ministry, India has become the fastest nation in terms of the vaccine doses administer­ed, even though many countries had launched their vaccinatio­n campaigns much earlier.

The third phase of vaccinatio­n against COVID-19 pandemic will begin from March 1 and will cover 27 crore of people above 60 and those above 45 years of age with comorbidit­ies at 10,000 government and over 20,000 private vaccinatio­n centres.

While people will be vaccinated free of cost at government hospitals, those taking the shots at private hospitals will have to pay.

 ??  ?? A medic collects swab sample in Amritsar
A medic collects swab sample in Amritsar

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