India's COVID-19 recovery rate improving, fatality rate declining: Health Ministry

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New Delhi: India's COVID-19 recovery rate has been improving and stands at 48.19 per cent now, whereas the rate of fatality has seen a steady decline to reach 2.83 per cent, the Union health ministry said on Monday as the death toll rose to 5,394 and the number of infections climbed to 1,90,535.

The country has registered a record single-day spike of8,392 cases and 230 deaths till Monday 8 AM and is now the seventh worst-hit nation by the COVID-19 pandemic, after US, Brazil, Russia, UK, Spain and Italy.

The number of active COVID-19 cases stood at 93,322 while 91,818 people have recovered so far, of whom 4,835 cured in the last 24 hours.

"The recovery rate in the country is progressively increasing and has reached 48.19 per cent amongst COVID-19 patient," the ministry said.

The recovery rate has improved from 11.42 per cent on April 15 to 26.59 per cent on May 3 and to 38.29 per cent on May 18, the ministry said.

Presently there are 93,322 active cases in the country which are under active medical supervision.

The case fatality rate is 2.83 per cent as against 6.19 per cent globally, the ministry said.

From 3.30 per cent on April 15, India's COVID-19 fatality rate declined to 3.25 per cent on May 3 and came down further to 3.15 per cent on May 18.

"A steady decline can be seen in the case fatality rate in the country. The relatively low death rate is attributed to the continued focus on surveillance, timely case identification and clinical management of the cases," the ministry said.

"Two specific trends are thus noticed, while the recovery rate is increasing on one hand, case fatality is going down on the other," it said.

The ministry further said that the testing capacity has increased in the country through 472 government and 204 private laboratories (total 676 laboratories). Cumulatively, 38,37,207 samples have been tested so far for COVID-19, whereas, 1,00,180 samples were tested yesterday.

Presenting the case fatality rate for countries having the highest number of deaths, vide WHO situation report-132 dated May 31, the ministry said USA with 1,01,567 deaths has a case fatality rate of 5.92 per cent while UK with 38,376 deaths has a case fatality rate of 14.07 per cent.

Italy, Spain, France and Brazil with 33,340, 29,043, 28,717 and 27,878 deaths have a case fatality rate (CFR) of 14.33 pc, 12.12 pc, 19.35 pc and 5.99 pc respectively.

Mexico which has reported 9,415 COVID-19 casualties has a CFR of 11.13 per cent, Germany with 8,500 deaths has a CFR of 4.68 per cent and Canada with 6,996 deaths has a CFR of 7.80 per cent.