Bengal on Thursday reported 246 Covid-19 infections, including 50 from Calcutta, 726 recoveries and six deaths.

This is for 18 consecutive days that the state recorded three-digit figures of fresh infections after cases had started climbing up on December 29 last year.

Nineteen of the state’s 23 districts reported zero deaths. Calcutta reported three. The state’s mortality rate is 1.05 per cent.

The positive confirmation rate is 0.8 per cent now — below 1 per cent for a week at a stretch, a first in the pandemic.

This was 27 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. A positive confirmation rate up to 5 per cent is considered tolerable in a pandemic. On January 10, the rate had reached an all-time high of 37.32.

The total of active cases dropped by 486 to reach 2,162 on Thursday.

This was 39 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 recovery rate improved for 39 consecutive days to reach 98.84 per cent. The national rate is 98.46 now.

Between December 29 and January 16, it had dropped by eight percentage points, before recovering by over eight points over these 39 days.

In these 39 days, the state reported over 2.73 lakh recoveries, which outweighed the 1.16 lakh new infections detected.

Bengal has over 20.14 lakh cases now, since the first was detected in the state in March, 2020. The total includes nearly 19.91 lakh recoveries and 21,165 deaths.