NEW DELHI: As India on Thursday reported 52,952 coronavirus cases, with 1,783 fatalities and 15,266 recoveries, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said India’s COVID mortality was the lowest in the world.
Flagging challenges in COVID response at a time when the disease graph has been gradually peaking instead of regressing as the government had hoped amid the lockdown Vardhan said the challenge was to prevent the disease from making its way to unaffected districts.
There are presently 319 unaffected districts in the green zone, 130 red districts and 284 orange ones.
Vardhan said India’s mortality from COVID was 3.3 per cent, the lowest globally.
He also pointed out that the satisfactory sign was a steadily improving recovery rate which should give people the confidence to report symptoms and seek care.
Around 28.8 per cent of all COVID patients have now recovered and gone home, the minister said.
Another “satisfactory“ development he noted was less severity of the disease considering only 1.1 per cent of all COVID patients are on ventilators, 3.3 per cent on medical oxygen and 4.8 per cent on ICU beds.
In absolute numbers this means only 582 of India’s 52,952 COVID patients are on ventilators; 17,47 on oxygen support and 2,541 on ICU beds.
India’s doubling rate calculated today as of the trends over the last 14 days is 10.6, while trends over the last seven days show a doubling rate of 10.2 days.
However, more and more districts, Vardhan said, were now managing to prolong the period of reporting of new infections, with 180 districts having no case between seven to 13 days; 164 districts with no case between 14 to 20 days and 136 districts with no case from 21 to 28 days.