India records 8,439 new Covid-19 cases, 23% higher than yesterday

New Delhi: India on Wednesday recorded 8,439 new Covid cases, 23 per cent higher than yesterday. This took the active caseload to 93,733, the lowest in 555 days. At least 195 deaths were also recorded in a day which took the death count to 4,73,952.

India's active cases account for less than 1% of total cases and are currently at 0.27% which is the lowest since March 2020.

The top five states which have registered maximum cases are Kerala with 4,656 cases, followed by Tamil Nadu with 710 cases, Maharashtra with 699 cases, West Bengal with 507 cases, and Karnataka with 299 cases.

81.41% of the new cases are reported from these five states, with Kerala alone responsible for 55.17% of the new cases.

Maximum casualties were reported in Kerala (134), followed by Maharashtra (19).

A total of 129.54 crore vaccine doses have been administered so far under the Nationwide Vaccination Drive.

The overall recovery rate currently stands at 98.36 per cent, highest since March 2020 as India logged 9,525 recoveries in the past 24 hours taking the total number of recoveries to 3,40,89,137.

Meanwhile, a World Health Organization official said the Omicron variant does not appear to cause more severe disease than previous Covid variants, and is "highly unlikely" to fully dodge vaccine protections.

He said that while a lot remained to be learned about the new, heavily mutated variant of Covid-19, preliminary data indicated it did not make people sicker than Delta and other strains.

The Indian Medical Association (IMA) on Tuesday warned that India may witness a massive third wave of COVID-19 if adequate measures are not taken to tackle the new Coronavirus variant Omicron.

Addressing a press conference, the IMA claimed that the Omicron variant, which has been labelled as 'Variant of Concern' by the World Health Organisation (WHO), will have high penetrability and will affect more people.