India logs 43% drop in daily numbers with 1,247 new Covid cases, 1 death

A day after reporting a worrisome 90 per cent jump in daily Covid numbers, India on Tuesday logged 1,247 fresh cases and only one death in the last 24 hours, according to the health ministry data. The country’s coronavirus have been fluctuating, while mostly on a downward trend, for the past few weeks as governments slowly started lifting pandemic restrictions.

The number of infections on Tuesday are almost 43 per cent fewer than Monday when India saw a spike of 2,075 cases in a day, the first time in nearly a month.

The daily fatalities reported, too, were drastically less than Monday’s data that showed 214 deaths. The government cautioned that most of these were because of Kerala’s reconciled records of unregistered past deaths. Experts also warned against reading too much into the trend since hospitalisation and death rates had not risen in tandem.

After a dreadful third wave of Covid-19 pandemic that pushed the daily tally above the 3-lakh mark in January, coronavirus cases have significantly dropped in the county. However, a new threat arose due to the rising rate of infections in neighbouring China and several European countries.

The WHO also sounded an alert over a highly transmissible XE variant of which two cases were reported by government officials from Mumbai and Gujarat earlier this month.