The State’s COVID-19 case graph in the third wave of the pandemic has been showing a steady drop for weeks now and on Wednesday there were 2,373 cases new when 36,747 samples were tested in the last 24 hours.
The third wave in the State, fuelled by the Omicron virus variant, had begun to rise on January 2 and at that time, the active case tally had stood at 19,185 cases, while the daily case tally had been a whopping 52,199 cases
The active case pool in the State now has less than 25,000 patients. On Wednesday, the number of patients in the active case pool dipped to 21,664.
It has taken just a month, for the active case pool to drop from close to four lakh, to the current 21,664 cases.
A total of 5,525 people recovered from COVID-19 on Wednesday. About 8.2% of the active cases are currently hospitalised.
A little over 1,500 patients with COVID-19 in hospitals in the State now. The total number of patients admitted with moderate or severe COVID in hospitals dipped to 1,634. New hospital admissions on Wednesday was 231.
The current ICU occupancy of COVID patients in both public and private hospitals in the State is down to 345, while the ventilator occupancy has dipped below 100 for the first time after several months to 98.
On Wednesday, the State declared 52 COVID deaths, of which 7 occurred within the last 24 hours and 45 were deaths which occurred in the last few days but which were declared only in the last 24 hours.
The State also added 44 pending COVID deaths to the official list of COVID fatalities. These are deaths which have now been accepted as COVID deaths by the Government as per the new guidelines of the Centre and following the appeals filed by families.
In all, the official cumulative COVID-19 case fatality in the State rose to 65,597. Of these, 30,241 (46.1 %) deaths were added after October 2021, following the death reconciliation exercise.
The State’s cumulative burden now stands at 65,04,433 cases.
Among the districts, Thiruvananthapuram reported the highest number of new cases with 407 cases followed by Ernakulam 405, Kottayam 248, Kollam 194, Kozhikode 172, Idukki 161, Thrissur 141, Alappuzha 131, Pathanamthitta 121, Malappuram 101, Wayanad 90, Kannur 89, Palakkad 75, and Kasaragod 38.
