India sees slight fall in daily Covid-19 tally at 7,447; new deaths up by 391

India on Friday witnessed a slight decline in its daily tally of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) cases after 7,447 new infections were reported in the last 24 hours, taking the caseload to 34,726,049, according to the Union health ministry.

As many as 7,886 patients recovered and 391 succumbed to Covid-19 in the last 24 hours. With this, the cumulative count of recoveries and deaths climbed to 34,162,765 and 476,869 respectively, the health ministry data further showed.

On Thursday, India had reported 7,974 cases, 343 deaths and 7,948 recoveries.

The active cases in the country further declined to 86,415 and account for less than 1% of the total cases. The overall recovery rate from Covid-19, meanwhile, stands at 98.38%, the highest since March 2020, the Union health ministry said on Friday.

According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), a total of 661,507,694 samples have been tested for Covid-19 so far of which 1,259,932 were tested in the last 24 hours.

The cumulative vaccination coverage is nearing 1.36 billion with more than seven million doses administered to eligible beneficiaries in the last 24 hours, the health ministry also said.

Of the total vaccine doses administered till now, 537,197,848 beneficiaries are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 and the remaining 822,798,419 have only received the first dose.

Meanwhile, India's Omicron variant tally has climbed to 83 after cases were reported from Delhi, Karnataka and Gujarat.

In Delhi, four cases of Covid-19 were found to be infected with the variant on Friday while Gujarat and Karnataka reported one and five cases respectively.

Currently, Maharashtra tops the list of Omicron cases in the country at 32, followed by Rajasthan at 17. The variant has also been detected in Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Chandigarh.