Bengal on Saturday reported 1,345 new Covid-19 infections, including 159 from Calcutta.

In 24 hours till 9am on Saturday, the state also logged 2,251 recoveries and 31 deaths, including eight from Calcutta. Hence, active cases dropped by 937 to 19,276 — less than 20,000 again after January 2, 34 days ago.

This was the 20th consecutive day of such a drop in the third wave in Bengal. Prior to this turnaround, the total active caseload had gone up nearly 22 times from the 7,457 of December 28 last year to 1.6 lakh on January 16.

The positive confirmation rate — the percentage of samples testing positive — was 3.66 per cent on Saturday. This was the fifth consecutive day in the third wave that the state reported a positive confirmation rate of less than 5 per cent.

Bengal’s recovery rate also went up for 20 days on the trot to reach 98 per cent on Saturday. The national recovery rate is 95.64 per cent.

Between December 29 and January 16, it had dropped by nearly eight percentage points, before recovering by close to eight percentage points over these 20 days.
In these 20 days, the state reported 2.47 lakh recoveries, which outweighed the 1.07 lakh new infections detected.

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

Bengal has over 20.05 lakh cases now, since the first was detected in the state in March, 2020. The total includes nearly 19.65 lakh recoveries and 20,789 deaths.