India's COVID-19 tally crosses 28m as daily cases fall

NEW DELHI -- India's COVID-19 tally surpassed the 28-million mark on Monday, reaching 28,047,534 with 152,734 new cases reported in the past 24 hours, the health ministry said.

The daily spike of new cases has been falling over the past couple of weeks. The cases registered in a day have fallen to the lowest level in the past 50 days. The daily cases breached the 150,000-mark on April 11.

Besides, as many as 3,128 deaths were reported since Sunday morning, taking the overall death toll to 329,100.

There are still 2,026,092 active cases in the country, as there was a decrease of 88,416 cases in the past 24 hours. The number of daily active cases has been on the decline over the past few days after a continuous surge since mid-April.

A total of 25,692,342 people has been cured and discharged from hospitals so far across the country, showed the latest data from the health ministry.

In January the number of daily cases in India had come down to below-10,000. As many as 9,102 new cases were reported on Jan 25-26, which was the lowest in the previous 237 days. Prior to that the lowest number of daily new cases were 9,304 registered on June 4, 2020.

So far over 213 million vaccination doses (213,154,129) have been administered to the people across the country since India kicked off a nationwide vaccination drive on Jan. 16.

A total of 1,018,076 vaccine doses were given on Sunday alone.

The third phase of COVID-19 vaccination is covering all people aged 18 years and above, although an acute shortage of vaccines is being felt across the country.

Meanwhile, the Indian government has ramped up COVID-19 testing facilities as over 344 million tests have been conducted so far.

As many as 344,866,883 tests were conducted till Sunday, out of which 1,683,135 tests were conducted on Sunday alone, said the latest data issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Monday.

Three types of vaccines are being administered to the people in India. While the Covishield vaccine, made by the Serum Institute of India, was supplied to all states, the Covaxin vaccine, made by the Bharat Biotech International Limited, was supplied to only 12 states.

Besides, the Russia-made vaccine Sputnik-V is also being administered.