The global Covid-19 caseload has surpassed 216 million with the world still struggling to contain the pandemic, but there may be better news for one of the worst-hit countries from the virus in the days ahead.
Covid-19 in India may be entering a stage of ‘endemicity’ where there is low or moderate level of transmission going on, Chief Scientist of the World Health Organisation Dr Soumya Swaminathan said over the weekend.
“We may be entering some kind of stage of endemicity where there is low level transmission or moderate level transmission going on but we are not seeing the kinds of exponential growth and peaks that we saw a few months ago," Dr Swaminathan said.
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According to Dr Swaminathan, the endemic stage is when a population "learns to live with a virus". It’s very different from the epidemic stage when a virus overwhelms a population.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that endemic “refers to the constant presence and/or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area."
In the endemic stage, disease spread and rates of infection are said to be fairly predictable.
India's COVID-19 tally rose to 32,695,030 (32.7 million) on Sunday, as 45,083 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours across the country, according to the federal health ministry's latest data.
Besides, 460 deaths due to the pandemic since Saturday morning took the total death toll to 437,830 - the world's third-highest after the USA and Brazil.
According to Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the total caseload and fatalities globally stand at 216,364,257 (over 216 million) and 4,500,596 (over 4.5 million) respectively, as of Monday morning.
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So far, 5,191,645,799 (almost 5.2 billion) vaccine doses have been administered across the globe. That number includes 3.1 billion, or 40 percent of the world population that has received at least one dose, and 2.1 billion, or 26.8 percent of the world population now fully vaccinated.
The US, which is the world's worst-hit country in terms of both cases and deaths, has so far logged 38,796,236 cases while 637,525 people have lost their lives to Covid to date, according to JHU.
Brazil currently has the world's second-highest pandemic death toll after the United States and the third-largest caseload after the United States and India.
The country has recorded 20,741,815 cases with 579,308 fatalities so far, according to the health ministry.
Situation in Bangladesh
With millions of people still waiting to receive their first doses of coronavirus vaccines, the deadly virus claimed 89 more lives in Bangladesh in 24 hours till Sunday morning and infected another 3,948 people.
The country's single-day death toll fell below 100 for the first time in more than two months with 80 deaths reported on Saturday.
Read: Covid fatalities shrink below 100 after 2 months
Since the start of the Covid pandemic in March last year, Bangladesh recorded 14,93,537 infections and 26,015 deaths, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).
The fresh cases were reported after testing 27,921 samples raising the daily case positivity rate to 14.14% from Saturday’s 13.67%.
Meanwhile, the recovery rate rose to 94.79 per cent, while the case fatality rate remained unchanged at 1.74% during the period.