Covid: India is recording 20,000 cases daily, some districts still in red zone, says Centre

India is still reporting around 20,000 Covid-19 cases on an average almost every day and only “a plateau” has been noted so far, the Centre said on Thursday. The government also noted that the challenges posed by the pandemic are not over yet.

Union health ministry Joint Secretary Lav Agarwal said that the overall Covid-19 positivity rate noted across the country “gives comfort”, but there were still a large number of districts that were reporting a high case positivity.

“India has observed two distinct peaks...during September 2020, close to 92,000 daily infections had been recorded,” Agarwal said during a briefing on India’s coronavirus situation. “In the peak of the second wave, 4.14 lakh cases had also been registered in the country. Now, in the last 24 hours, about 22,000 cases had been reported...But a distinct reduction has not been noted to say that we have managed the infection completely.”

“The second wave is not over and we still have districts in the red zone,” the health ministry said. “There are 28 districts where the weekly case positivity rate has been recorded between 5 to 10%.”

Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Mizoram and Karnataka still have high active case load, the government said. The health ministry added that Kerala had reported 50% of the total Covid-19 cases in India last week.

Kerala has currently recorded more than one lakh active cases and the numbers in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Mizoram and Karnataka is between 10,000 and 50,000.

Agarwal also cautioned citizens about the risk of a resurgence of Covid-19 during the upcoming festival and wedding seasons.

“Please watch October, November, December,” the health ministry official said. He also advised against going into crowded areas and unnecessary travel.

The Centre highlighted that 71% of India’s adult citizens have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, and 27% of the population have received both the doses.

India has administered 48,12,094 vaccine doses as of 7.49 pm on Thursday, according to the government’s CoWin portal.

On Thursday morning, India recorded 22,431 new coronavirus cases, pushing the infection tally to 3,38,94,312 since the pandemic first broke out in January last year. Thursday’s infection count is 19.1% higher than Wednesday’s tally of 18,833.