An elderly Covid-19 patient was killed after a fire broke out at the Burdwan Medical College and Hospital in West Bengal on Saturday morning, officials said.

The deceased, Sandhya Mondal (60), was admitted to a Covid ward of the hospital, where the blaze erupted around 4 am, they said.

Other patients in the ward were safe as they were moved to another wing in time, hospital sources said.

Hospital authorities doused the blaze before fire brigade personnel arrived, the sources said.

A five-member team has been constituted to investigate the cause of the fire, Hospital Superintendent Tapas Kumar Ghosh said.

Notably, Bengal on Friday reported 3,805 new Covid-19 infections, including 481 from Calcutta.

In 24 hours till 9 am on Friday, the state also logged 13,767 recoveries and 34 deaths, resulting in a drop in the total of active cases by 9,996 to 45,729.

This was the 12th consecutive day of such a drop in the third wave, resulting in improvement by over 71 per cent in the total 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 positive confirmation rate — the percentage of samples testing positive for the novel coronavirus — was 6.15 per cent, compared to 9.02 on Thursday. In a pandemic, a positive confirmation rate of up to 5 per cent is considered tolerable.

Friday was the 31st day since the escalation of the third wave in Bengal, evident from the Covid-19 stats since December 29 last year.