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Amidst a COVID-19 surge across the country, India on Thursday, 5 May, recorded an uptick in infections with 3,275 cases and 55 deaths in the last 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry said in its health bulletin.
With a daily positivity rate of 0.77 percent, active cases in the country stood at 19,179. Meanwhile, a total of 3,010 patients recovered as of 7 am on Thursday, 5 May, bringing the total number of recoveries in the country to 4,25,47,699.
A total of over 89.63 crore beneficiaries across the country have received their COVID-19 vaccine.
Meanwhile, Delhi on Thursday reported 1,365 new coronavirus cases, nearly as many as the 1,354 infections reported on Wednesday, 4 May. The positivity rate declined to 6.35 percent.
The Indian SARS-CoV2 Genomics Sequencing Consortium (INSACOG), a network of national testing laboratories set up by the Government of India, on Tuesday, confirmed the first case of Omicron sub-variant XE in the country.
This testing result comes weeks after an unknown variant infected two persons from Maharashtra and Gujarat.
According to the INSACOG bulletin, the XE variant is a recombinant, wherein the coronavirus is a mixture of two strains bound to emerge as one single virus transmitting among people.
The discovery of a new sub-variant of Omicron comes just months after the country suffered a third wave of COVID-19 in January.
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