As per the Health Ministry, more than 22 lakh patients have been discharged after recovering from Covid-19 across India while the coronavirus has claimed over 55,000 lives in the country.
File photo of medics in Kozhikode collecting swab samples for Covid-19 tests (Photo Credits: PTI)
India’s novel coronavirus caseload climbed to 30 lakh confirmed cases on Saturday. At present, India stands third after the US and Brazil with 56 lakh and 35 lakh confirmed cases of Covid-19 respectively.
According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) Covid dashboard last updated at 8 am on August 22, India’s tally of active cases stood at 6,97,330 while 22,22,577 patients have been discharged after recovering from the infection and 55,794 have succumbed to it.
The Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) declared on Saturday that 3,44,91,073 samples have been tested for Covid-19 across India as of August 22. As many as 10,23,836 of these tests were conducted on Friday itself. This marked a landmark for India- conducting a million Covid-19 tests in a single day.
COVID-19 Testing Update . For more details visit: https://t.co/dI1pqvXAsZ @MoHFW_INDIA @DeptHealthRes #ICMRFIGHTSCOVID19 #IndiaFightsCOVID19 #CoronaUpdatesInIndia #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/uJeWpo7VBb
— ICMR (@ICMRDELHI) August 22, 2020
The country reported a spike of 69,878 new cases on August 22. In addition, the recovery rate rose to 74.30 per cent while the fatality rate dropped to 1.89 per cent. The share of active cases also dropped to 23.82 per cent.
Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan told a national daily earlier this week that vaccine trials against Covid-19 are being fast-tracked globally. He went on to add that trials of Indian vaccines, including Covacin, will be completed by the end of this year. Apart from Covaxin which is being developed by Bharat Biotech, ICMR and the National Institute of Virology (NIV), the Pune-based Serum Institute of India is also gearing up to begin advance clinical trials of the Covid-19 vaccine candidate made by the University of Oxford.
On Saturday, Puducherry recorded 520 new cases while another 5375 people tested positive for Covid-19 in Uttar Pradesh. Similarly, Delhi reported 1412 fresh cases and the Andhra Pradesh Health Department recorded 10,276 more confirmed cases in the state while the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir witnessed a spike of 610 in its caseload.