Bengal on Sunday reported 835 new Covid-19 infections, including 108 from Calcutta, a three-digit figure for the first time since December 28 last year, 40 days ago.

In 24 hours till 9am on Sunday, the state also logged 2,083 recoveries and 34 deaths, including 14 from Calcutta, resulting in a drop in active cases by 1,282 to 17,994.

With this, Bengal saw 21 uninterrupted days of drop in active cases in the third wave and an 89 per cent drop in the total number since January 17. Prior to this turnaround, the total active caseload had gone up by nearly 22 times from the 7,457 of December 28 last year to 1.6 lakh on January 16.

The spike of the third wave in Bengal was evident from Covid data since December 29.

The number of infections reported on Sunday is a sharp drop from Saturday's 1,345, but the state only conducted 25,020 Covid-19 tests in 24 hours till 9am on Sunday, compared to 36,772 the day before. However, positive confirmation rate — the percentage of samples testing positive — improved slightly to 3.34 per cent on Sunday, from the 3.66 per cent on Saturday.

This was the sixth consecutive day in the third wave that the state reported a positive confirmation rate of less than 5 per cent. On January 10, the positive confirmation rate was an all-time high for the state at 37.32 per cent.

The recovery rate also improved for three consecutive weeks to reach 98.06 per cent. The national rate is 95.91.

Between December 29 and January 16, it had dropped by nearly eight percentage points, before recovering by close to eight percentage points over these three weeks.

In the three weeks, the state reported nearly 2.5 lakh recoveries, which outweighed the 1.08 lakh new infections detected.

Thirteen of the state’s 23 districts reported zero deaths. The mortality rate is 1.04 per cent now.

Bengal has nearly 20.06 lakh cases now, since the first was detected in the state in March 2020. The total includes more than 19.67 lakh recoveries and 20,823 deaths.