NEW DELHI: For the first time in the country, the Covid-19 fatality rate has fallen below 2% as it is just 1.99% at present, the Centre said on Tuesday.
Union health secretary Rajesh Bhushan in a press briefing on Covid-19 management said that in a video conference meeting with the Chief Ministers of 10 states -- which have about 80% of active Covid-19 caseloads in India -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi has emphasised on reducing infection mortalities and bring it under 1%.
These 10 states have also reported about 81% of 45,257 infection deaths in the country so far. India now has 22,68,675 confirmed cases of infection of which 6,39,929 patients are under active medical supervision -- either at home or in hospitals.
The PM also asked the four states -- Bihar, Gujarat, Telangana, and West Bengal -- to considerably increase their daily testing in order to detect fresh cases, said the senior bureaucrat.
The secretary also said that the states have been advised not to get overawed by a "mere increase" in daily positive cases of Covid-19 and have been asked to pursue the policy of aggressive testing, comprehensive tracing and tracking and efficient clinical management of cases.
The official said that the active cases of Covid-19, which comprised 88.83% of the total caseload on March 31, have reduced to 28.21% as of now.
"Of the total active cases of Covid-19, less than 1% of patients are on ventilators, less than 3% of the people are on oxygen support and less than 4 % of the people are in ICU," he said.
The official also underlined that a total of 2.5 crore tests to detect fresh Covid-19 cases have been conducted so far and the number of recovered patients has crossed the 15 lakh mark.
The Union Health Ministry, meanwhile, said that the successful implementation of containment strategy, aggressive testing coupled with standardized clinical management of critical patients, has resulted in the rise of Covid-19 recovery rate to nearly 70%.