Bengal on Wednesday logged 3,237 new Covid-19 cases, 2,971 recoveries and 61 deaths.

With this, Bengal went past 2.12 lakh cases, since the first was detected on March 17, of which over 1.84 lakh are recoveries and 4,123 are deaths.

After a 15-day streak of fall in total of active cases ended on September 8, Bengal has now seen a rise for nine consecutive days.

Despite that, the recovery rate continued to climb and was 86.69 on Wednesday, a rise by over 12 per cent in a month. The national rate is 78.58 per cent now.

“In a month, we had around 96,000 new cases, but we had over 97,000 recoveries. We are looking to get our recovery rate well past 90 before the end of this month,” said a minister.

Of the 61 deaths, 15 were from Calcutta and 11 from North 24-Parganas. The two districts have contributed 60 per cent of all Covid-19 deaths recorded in Bengal since March 23. Of the toll, 3,536 deaths (85.8 per cent) were reported comorbid by the state government. The overall mortality rate stayed at 1.94, while the national rate is 1.62 per cent.

“Reducing the mortality rate… halving it to less than 1 is our foremost priority now… we hope to be able to start seeing the results by the end of this month,” the minister said.

The state also reported 45,713 tests on Wednesday, taking the total past 26 lakh.

Steady rise in testing, coupled with relatively lower cases being found has improved the positive confirmation rate from 8.9 on August 23 to 8.14 per cent. A decreasing positive confirmation rate is indicative of reducing levels of Covid-19 spread.

Having begun testing in early February, Bengal took three-and-a-half months to cover 1 lakh tests. Four months on, it did 25 lakh more.

The state reported 33.09 per cent occupancy of 12,675 Covid-19 beds in 92 hospitals.

Over 2.17 lakh telemedicine consultations have been provided, including 4,328 in the past 24 hours.