Over 3 lakh fresh Covid-19 cases each on Saturday and Sunday

The Covid-19 pandemic in the country continues to remain acute as the country reported over 3.06 lakh cases on Sunday, marginally lesser than the 3.37 lakh cases reported a day ago. The number of total active cases in the country is now at 22.49 lakh, with a national recovery rate of 93.07%.

The daily positivity rate is at 20.75%, while the weekly positivity rate is 17.03%. While active cases stand at 5.69% of total cases so far, 2.43 lakh people recovered in the last 24 hours. The country did over 14.74 lakh tests on Sunday. India has administered over 162.26 crore vaccine doses so far under nationwide vaccination drive.

While Karnataka reported over 50,000 cases on Sunday, Maharashtra reported over 40,000 cases. Over 26,000 fresh cases were reported in Bangalore and now Karnataka has over 3.57 lakh active cases with a test positivity rate of nearly 23%. Kerala reported over 45,000 cases with a test positivity rate of nearly 45%. The southern state has reported over 40,000 new cases continuously for the last four days. Tamil Nadu is also reporting over 30,000 cases for the past couple of days.

Meanwhile, a computational modelling study by IIT Madras' Department of Mathematics and Centre of Excellence for Computational Mathematics and Data Science says the third wave of Covid-19 is likely to hit its peak within the next two weeks.

The study observes that the pace of infection and pandemic spread in the country will come down in the coming days. India's R-value (the number of people an infected person can potentially spread the disease), has reduced to 1.57 in the week from January 14 to January 21 from 2.2 a week before. If R-value goes below 1, the pandemic is considered to be under control.