India’s COVID-19 Recoveries Cross 50 Lakh: A Look at the Numbers

India’s total recoveries have crossed the 50 lakh milestone, with an additional 74,893 recoveries registered in the last 24 hours taking the cumulative total to 50,16,520. The last 10 lakh recoveries were added in just 11 days.

The country reported 82,170 new cases of coronavirus on Monday, 28 September, taking the tally to 60,74,703. The death toll increased by 1,039 to 95,542, and active cases have risen to 9,62,640.

With almost 50 lakh cases recovered, the national recovery rate has reached 82.58 percent.

Even though India is expected to become the worst-hit country in a few weeks, a positive trend emerging is the decline in daily new infections in the country.

India’s newly reported infections have remained below 90,000 for six straight days (figure 1) after hitting a record 97,894 on 16 September. The recoveries, however, fell sharply on Sunday, the lowest they have been since 10 September. The number of recovered patients had been exceeding fresh cases for over a week now (figure 2), with the exception of the data reported on 25 and 28 September.

In fact, last Monday, over 1.01 lakh people were cured of COVID-19 in the country.

73 percent of the new recovered cases are being reported from ten states, namely Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Kerala, Odisha, West Bengal and Punjab. Maharashtra leads the tally with more than 13,000 new cases of recovered patients (and also the tally of the total cases).

India continues to remain the second worst-hit country after the United States, but is reported to have the highest recoveries in the world.

According to an AP report from Friday, even though there was a dip in testing for five days, it picked up again to 1.1 million, the health ministry said.

However, the tests fell to only 7 lakh on Sunday, a slump that is usually always seen on the last day of the week, which would indicate the actual cases may be higher than what was reported.

The Indian Council of Medical Research has notified that 7,19,67,230 tests have been conducted in the country up to 27 September, out of which 7,09,394 were freshly added in the past 24 hours. A significant number of these, however, are antigen tests which are less accurate and have higher chances of false negatives than the RT-PCR tests.

(The article was first published in FIT and has been republished with permission)