India’s Covid-19 epidemic is shrinking with a steady decline in daily new infections over the past 10 days despite stable numbers of tests nationwide, health officials said on Tuesday but cautioned against any laxity on precautions and public health measures.

Health authorities on Tuesday recorded about 263,000 new Covid-19 cases over the previous 24 hours, a 36 per cent fall from a peak of about 414,000 cases on May 6, the drop driven mainly by declines in India’s top three most populated states — Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar.

Some public health experts had expressed concern last week that declining or plateauing numbers of tests at a time the epidemic is growing could show up as an artificial fall in numbers.

But health officials have said India has seen a “consistent upward trend in weekly tests” since mid-February with average daily tests increasing more than 2.5-fold over the past 14 weeks.

India’s case positivity rate — the proportion found infected among those tested — which is a measure of the efficiency of detecting cases, has for the first time declined from 21 per cent to 16 per cent over the past week, after a steady increase over the previous 13 weeks. Ideally, it should be below 5 per cent.

“The epidemic is shrinking overall and that has happened because there is a huge comprehensive containment effort,” said Vinod Paul, the chair of the national Covid-19 task force and member of the Niti Aayog, the government’s apex think tank.

The decline, Paul said, “is because of what we’re doing… we cannot again let this go out of hand”.

Sections of public health and medical experts have blamed the Narendra Modi government for helping accelerate the spread of the virus through potential superspreader events such as election rallies and the Kumbh Mela and for not doing enough to prepare for the surge.

The health ministry in its daily update on the epidemic on Tuesday said India had for the first time recorded more than 400,000 recoveries of Covid-19 patients in a single day and described this as a “landmark achievement”.

But epidemiologists say there is nothing surprising about that large number as it only reflects the quantum of daily new cases detected over the past two weeks and the country’s fairly steady case fatality rate of about 1.1 per cent.

Health authorities on Tuesday recorded 4,329 deaths — the country’s highest-ever count — over the previous 24 hours, raising the total deaths to 278,719 among over 25 million lab-confirmed Covid-19 infections, or a case fatality rate of 1.1 per cent.

The health ministry also said the number of lab-confirmed infections in India until now made up only about 1.8 per cent of the country’s population, compared with 10 per cent of the US population, 7 per cent of Brazil’s population and 9 per cent of France’s population.

“Despite the large number of cases reported so far, we have been able to contain the spread to less than 2 per cent of the population,” said Lav Agarwal, joint secretary in the ministry.

But health experts say this is a misleading fraction because a nationwide survey by the Indian Council of Medical Research, a unit of the health ministry, had found that about 21 per cent of the population had already been infected by January this year.