Bengal on Tuesday reported 146 Covid-19 infections, which included 32 from Calcutta.

The state also logged 164 recoveries and two deaths, resulting in a drop in the total of active cases by 20 to 1,808. Both the deaths were in Calcutta.

This was 44 consecutive days of such a drop in the third wave, resulting in improvement by 99 per cent in the total since January 17. Prior to this turnaround, the total active caseload had gone up by nearly 22 times between December 28 and January 16 to 1.6 lakh.

The state’s recovery rate is 98.86 per cent now.

Between December 29 and January 16, it had dropped by eight percentage points, before recovering by over eight percentage points. In these 44 days, the state reported 2.75 lakh recoveries, which outweighed the 1.17 lakh new infections detected.

The positive confirmation rate was 0.61 per cent on Tuesday. The rate has been below 1 per cent for 12 consecutive days, in a first this pandemic.

This was 32 consecutive days in the third wave that the state reported a positive confirmation rate of less than 5 per cent in a 24-hour period. The positive confirmation rate up to 5 per cent is considered tolerable.

On January 10, the rate had reached an all-time high of 37.32 per cent.

The state’s mortality rate is 1.05 per cent now.

Bengal has recorded over 20.15 lakh cases till now since the first was detected in March, 2020. The total includes more than 19.92 lakh recoveries and 21,178 deaths.