India's daily COVID-19 caseload surpasses 20,000 mark

NEW DELHI, July 28 (Xinhua) -- India's daily COVID-19 caseload Thursday surpassed the 20,000 mark again after remaining below it for the past three days, officials said.

According to federal health ministry data released on Thursday, 20,557 new cases of COVID-19 were reported during the past 24 hours, taking the total tally to 43,959,321 in the country. The active caseload currently stands at 146,323.

The country also logged 44 related deaths during this period, which has pushed the overall death toll to 526,211 since the beginning of the pandemic, the ministry said.

With the increase in cases, the daily positivity rate stands at 5.18 percent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded at 4.71 percent, the ministry data showed.

The ministry said so far 43,286,787 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals, of whom 19,216 were discharged during the past 24 hours.

According to the federal health ministry, the cumulative COVID-19 vaccination coverage in the country has exceeded 2 billion doses, and until Thursday morning 2,032,182,347 doses were administered.

So far over, 874 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.

Recently, the Indian government said an estimated 40 million eligible beneficiaries in the country have not taken even a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

At present, the government is focusing on promoting booster doses as the uptake for the third dose has been low.