COVID-19 caseload in India inches to 20,000 mark, with 53 related deaths

India's daily COVID-19 caseload has inched closer to the 20,000 mark after remaining below it for the past three days, officials said.

According to federal health ministry data, 19,893 new cases of COVID-19 were reported during the past 24 hours, taking the total tally to 44,087,037 in the country.

With the fresh cases, India's active caseload currently stands at 136,478.

The country also logged 53 related deaths during the past 24 hours, pushing the overall death toll to 526,530 since the beginning of the pandemic, the ministry said.

With the increase in cases, the daily positivity rate stands at 4.94 percent and the weekly positivity rate was recorded at 4.64 percent, the ministry data showed.

So far, 43,424,029 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals, of whom 20,419 were discharged during the past 24 hours.

According to the ministry, the cumulative COVID-19 vaccination coverage in the country has exceeded 2 billion doses and until Thursday morning, 2,052,251,408 doses were administered.

Over 876 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted across the country.

A cumulative total of 876,760,536 samples have been tested up to Wednesday, the Indian Council of Medical Research said Thursday. Out of these 403,006 tests were conducted on Wednesday alone.

Health experts say COVID-19 is a cyclical disease and will come in waves.

The federal government said that ­given the emergence of COVID-19 variants with variable transmissibility and other public health implications, the health ministry was closely following the COVID-19 trajectory globally and in the country.

In the wake of the detection of new variants, the government is focusing on improving booster dose coverage as the uptake for the third dose has been low.

Last week, no new variants of ­COVID-19 were detected in India, the government said. However, it said various Omicron sub-lineages are circulating across all states with the clinical presentation remaining largely the same.

Local governments in various states have issued advisories urging people to wear face masks and following ­COVID-19 protocols in mass gatherings in the wake of an increase in daily infections.