NEW DELHI: In the gloomy UK backdrop, India on Tuesday presented a brighter picture on the Covid-19 front, with less than 20,000 daily infections being documented for the first time.
Even as 19,556 persons were detected with positive symptoms, only three out of 35 states and Union territories had new infections. And that too at a lower rate -- Odisha (51), Assam (5) and Arunachal Pradesh (2).
Deaths at the rate of 301 in the last 24 hours were also the lowest after many months, while daily recoveries at 30,376 exceeded the infections.
The active case load on hospitals also dropped to 2,92,518, which is 2.9% of the total infections of 1,00,75,116. The number of persons discharged from hospitals and other care centres went up to 96.36 lakh, which is 95.65% of the total infections.
The positivity rate also dropped below 2% at 1.82%, which is the number of infections detected out of total tests carried out in a day.
As many as 10.72 lakh persons were tested in 24 hours, raising the total population tested to 16.32 crore.
Daily deaths in Maharashtra plummeted to 55 from the previous day's 98, followed by 41 in West Bengal, 27 in Delhi and 18 in Chhattisgarh.
Globally, 1.71 million succumbed to the dreaded disease, as against 77.72 million infected.
India’s active cases per million population are among the lowest in the world. The figure is much higher for countries like USA, Italy, Brazil, Turkey and Russia.
Meanwhile, the government's think-tank Niti Aayog on Tuesday said the new strain of coronavirus that is spreading rapidly in the UK, has not been detected in India.
