India's daily COVID-19 caseload remains above 20,000-mark for 3rd day

India's daily COVID-19 caseload Saturday remained above the 20,000-mark for the third straight day, officials said.

According to federal health ministry data released on Saturday morning, 20,408 new cases of COVID-19 were reported during the past 24 hours, taking the total tally to 44,000,138 in the country.

The number of cases reported on Saturday was almost similar to the daily caseload of Friday, which was 20,409.

With the reporting of fresh cases, India's active caseload currently stands at 143,384.

The country also logged 54 related deaths during the past 24 hours, pushing the overall death toll to 526,312 since the beginning of the pandemic, the ministry said.

With the increase in cases, the daily positivity rate stands at 5.05 percent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded at 4.92 percent, the ministry data showed.

The ministry said so far 43,330,442 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals, of whom 20,958 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 Saturday morning 2,039,433,480 doses were administered.

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

A cumulative total of 874,811,197 samples have been tested up to July 29, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said Saturday. Out of these, 404,399 tests were conducted on Friday alone.

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

At present the Indian government is focusing on promoting booster doses as the uptake for the third dose has been low. According to officials, the exercise is aimed at improving the booster dose coverage among people in the wake of the detection of new variants.

The government on Friday said no new variant of concern of COVID-19 has been detected in India since Omicron. However, it said various Omicron sub-lineages are circulating across all states with clinical presentation remaining largely the same.

Last week the federal government in the Indian parliament said given the emergence of COVID-19 variants with variable transmissibility and other public health implications, the health ministry was closely following the COVID-19 trajectory globally and in the country.

Local governments in various states have issued advisories urging people to wear face masks and follow COVID-19 protocols in mass gatherings.