India’s COVID-19 recovery rate improved to 47.4% on Saturday from 38.29% on May 18.
The Union Health Ministry stated that to scale up testing and enhance reach across the country, city/regional clusters have been established in a hub-and-spoke model.
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“Institutes and labs which have the capacity and expertise for both sample collection, handling/processing (BSL-2 facility) and testing (RT-PCR) serve as the hubs and they [will] involve a number of laboratories which have RT-PCR machines and the requisite manpower as their extended testing facilities,” a senior health official said.
The Ministry added that the hubs are the government labs approved by the Ministries and so far 19 city/regional clusters had been established.
These are in Delhi/NCR, Ahmedabad, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Banaras, Palampur among other areas.
“Clusters on the other hand will now be scaled up in next four weeks to reach remote corners of the country,” the Ministry said.
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Meanwhile during the past 24 hours, a total of 11,264 COVID-19 patients have recovered, according to the Ministry.
“This is the highest number of recovered patients recorded in a day. Thus, so far, a total of 82,369 patients have been cured of COVID-19. This has resulted in a recovery rate of 47.40% amongst COVID-19 patients, an increase of 4.51% in the recovery rate from the previous day’s recovery rate of 42.89%,” it said.
India recorded 7,964 new COVID-19 cases — the highest so far— and 265 deaths in the last 24 hours. Total number of cases in the country now stands at 1,73,763 and 4,971 deaths.
Data from State health departments put the total number of cases in the country at 1,76,840 with 87,362 active cases. The nationwide toll was 5,028.
The country has seen a steady rise in the average number of cases per day over the last month.
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The average number of new cases per day for the six-day period of May 8-14 was 3, 675. This figure stands at 6,738 for the period May 22-28. The average number of deaths per day for the two periods is 116 and 164 respectively
Doubling time which in the past 14 days was 13.3, has improved to 15.4 in the last three days. The fatality rate is 2.86%, added the Ministry.
The Ministry added that cumulatively 36,12,242 tests have been done so far for COVID-19, whereas, 1,26,842 samples were tested on Friday.
