India reports lowest daily infections in almost six months

Indian Health officials on Wednesday said the country recorded its lowest new daily coronavirus infections since March, a day after reporting its lowest COVID-19 related death toll in the same time frame. 

“This is good news for India,” said Dr. Thekkekara Jacob John, a senior virologist in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, according to The New York Times.

“Hospitals will not be overwhelmed, there will be no shortage of drugs,” he added. “We are more experienced in treating the patients and, more important, doctors are relaxed.”

The country recorded 179 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday and 378 on Wednesday. India averaged 4,000 coronavirus related deaths per day in March, according to The Times. New daily cases peaked in May, topping 366,000. 

Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi warned earlier this year there was a chance that cases and deaths in India were undercounted during the second wave in April. 

“Last year we estimated that only one in about 30 infections were being caught by testing, so the reported cases are a serious underestimate of true infections,” he said, according to CNN. “This time, the mortality figures are probably serious underestimates, and what we’re seeing on the ground is many more deaths, than what has been officially reported.”

State data shows there are currently more than 28,000 active cases across the country. 

About 234 million people in India have completed their vaccinations while another 409 million are partially vaccinated in a country with a population of around 1.4 billion, The Times noted. 

There have been 33,716,451 COVID-19 infections and 447,751 deaths reported in India since the beginning of the pandemic, according to data compiled by Reuters.