Active Covid-19 cases in India have decreased for three straight days for the first time since early March, as has the seven-day average of daily cases, both indicating that the country may have reached, or is closing to reaching, the peak of the devastating second wave of the pandemic.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday said that Covid cases were going down in Delhi, so was the second wave.
ˇ°With your cooperation lockdown was successful. We've increased number of Oxygen beds in past few days. Yesterday, we started 500 new ICU beds near GTB Hospital. Now there's no shortage of ICU and Oxygen beds in Delhi, the Chief minister said.
Ranking second after Maharashtra on Covid tracker in the country, total positive cases crossed 20 lakh in Karnataka, with 39,510 new cases in a day, while 480 patients succumbed to the infection in the last 24 hours, said the state health bulletin on Tuesday.
"With 39,510 new cases registered on Monday, the state's Covid tally shot up to 20,13,193, including 5,87,452 active cases, while recoveries rose to 14,05,869, with 22,584 patients discharged during the day,' said the daily bulletin.
As many as 56 prisoners in Haryana's Karnal Jail had tested positive for COVID-19 in the last few days.
According to Yogesh Sharma, Civil Surgeon, Karnal, the prisoners have been kept in isolation after they tested positive for Covid-19.
The Subject Expert Committee (SEC) on Wednesday gave its nod to Bharat Biotech for the phase 2 and 3 human clinical trials of its Covid-19 vaccine Covaxin to be conducted on 2 to 18-year-olds.
This is the first vaccine that has been cleared for clinical trials on children in India.
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday informed that the B.1.617 variant of Covid-19, first found in India in October last year, had been detected in sequences uploaded "from 44 countries in all six WHO regions".
"As of 11 May, over 4500 sequences have been uploaded to GISAID (platform of data sharing mechanism for influenza) and assigned to B.1.617 from 44 countries in all six WHO regions, and WHO has received reports of detections from five additional countries," WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic.