NEW DELHI: Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare (MoH&FW) Dr Harsh Vardhan chaired the 28th meeting of the Group of Ministers (GoM) on Monday and said that India has 14,01,609 active Covid cases. He added that the country's recovery rate is climbing and stood at 93.94 per cent now.
"The country reported its first Covid case on January 30, 2020. Till now we have reported 2,89,09,975 cases in the country out which 2,71,059,180 people have recovered. Today we have 14,01,609 active cases in the country. A couple of weeks back we had over 37 lakhs active cases in the country. Our recovery rate is climbing up which is right now 93.94 per cent," Vardhan said.
"In the last 24 hours, we have the least number of cases in the last 61 days which is 1,00,636 cases, 1,74,399 recoveries were reported. Our fatality rate is 1.20 per cent," the minister said.
He said that a total of 23,27,86,482 vaccine doses have been administered to various categories of people in the country.
"Between 18- 44 years of age, we have given the 1st dose to 2,86,18,514 peopleand second dose to 1,68,00,302 people. As of today morning, 1,43,01,409 doses are still available with the states. 36.64 crore tests have been done in the country. Yesterday we did over 15 lakh tests despite it being a Sunday," he further said.
"The daily positivity rate is declining and is at 6.34 per cent, which is less than 10 per cent for the 25 th consecutive day. There are 15 states where the positivity rate is greater than 10 per cent. 83 per cent of active cases are in 10 states. Seven states Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Gujarat have less than 1000 cases," added.
"We know RNA viruses have the potential for frequent mutations and can affect disease transmission and severity. We had established 10 national labs and we have done 30,000 sequencings. Recently we added 18 more labs taking to a total of 28 labs for genome sequencing," the Minister said.
Union Ministers Hardeep S Puri, S Jaishankar, Ashwani Kumar Choubey and several others attended the meet.
Union Health Minister also informed about the key presentations that are to be held in the meeting
"Dr V K Paul will do a presentation on latest vaccination status, future plans and about what is being done about vaccination of children and up-gradation of infrastructure around paediatric wards. The way forward of handling Covid appropriate behaviour in the society will be addresed in the presentation," he said.
"We will have another presentation by Girdhar, Aramane, MoRTH secretary. He is going to brief us about the availability of oxygen and about the ongoing project for putting up various PSA plants in the country. Amit Khare, secretary of Information and Broadcasting will also do a presentation," he added.