The government has said that the recovered cases of COVID-19 have exceeded the active cases by more than 96,000. Health Ministry said the graded, pre-emptive, and pro-active steps taken by the Centre along with the States and Union territories for prevention, containment, and management of COVID-19 are showing encouraging results.

During the last 24 hours, a total of 13,940 COVID-19 patients have been cured, taking the cumulative figure to 2,85,636.

The Ministry announced that, the recovery rate of COVID-19 patients has reached 58.24 per cent. Presently, there are over 1,89,000 active cases and all are under active medical supervision.The Ministry said, ICMR has inducted 11 new labs in the last 24 hours. India now has 1,016 diagnostic labs dedicated to COVID-19. This includes 737 in the government sector and 279 private labs.

The number of samples tested every day continues to steadily grow. During the past 24 hours, over 2,15000 tests have been conducted in the labs. The total number of samples tested are over 77 lakh.

Meanwhile, the serological survey in Delhi will begin today and it will be carried out jointly by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and Delhi Government. Training of all the concerned survey teams was completed on Thursday. This survey will be conducted in all the districts of Delhi to understand the proportion of the population exposed to Corona infection.
 
Two age categorizations have been set to conduct the survey, one is for below 18 years of age group and another for above 18 years.
 
Depending upon the level of seroprevalence of infection, appropriate public health interventions can be planned and implemented for prevention and control of the disease.
 
As per the Indian Council of Medical Research, periodic serosurveys are useful to guide the policymakers to conduct surveys in high-risk areas or vulnerable population who have been infected in the past and has now recovered.
 
The survey will involve the collection of blood samples from randomly selected individuals. Blood samples will be collected for detecting IgG antibodies and it would be conducted using an IgG ELISA kit.

In another important update, yesterday, the World Health Organization has warned that the number of Covid-19 cases will touch one crore mark within the next week. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s emergency program, said many countries in North, South, and Central America, are still suffering sustained community transmission. He said the pandemic for many countries in the Americas has not yet peaked.

The number of new cases globally jumped by 1,33.326 on Tuesday, according to data from the WHO. More than a third of those cases came from Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brazil, and the United States, which reported a combined total of 58,583 new cases in a single day. The US remains the worst-hit country in the world with more than 2.3 million cases and at least 1,21,279 deaths.