COVID-19: India registers slight increase in fresh cases, 44,643 cases in last 24 hrs

New Delhi: India has logged in 44,643 new cases of coronavirus over the past 24 hours, with this the total number of those infected has reached 31,856,757, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) said on Friday.

The COVID death toll reached 426,754, with 464 new fatalities being recorded over the past day.

Total 31,015,844 people have recovered in the country since the start of the outbreak. With this, the recovery rate now stands at 97.37 per cent.

The active cases constitute 1.30 per cent of total cases in the country.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said 47,65,33,650 samples have been tested for the virus since the pandemic hit the country. Of these, 16,40,287 tests were conducted on Thursday.

Meanwhile, 57,97,808 vaccine doses were administered against the virus during the day. This pushed the total count of jabs to 49,53,27,595 as part of the nationwide vaccination drive launched earlier this year.

A day earlier, the country confirmed 42,982 new coronavirus cases, with 533 fatalities.

India comes second in terms of the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, following the United States with more than 35.43 million patients.

World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. To date, more than 200.81 million people have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, with over 4.26 million fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University. (UNI)