Kerala, Karnataka, and more: THESE five states account for 80% of India's active Covid cases

Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and two other states account for over 80 per cent of Covid cases in India, according to government data till Wednesday. The country's daily Covid tally, which was relatively lower till November last year, has surged in the last few weeks due to the emergence of new sub-variant JN.1, whose transmissibility rate is higher than previous variants.  
 
Till Wednesday, India's active Covid tally stood at 4,565. Of these, the highest number of cases was in Kerala (1,712), followed by Karnataka (1,245), Maharashtra (731), Tamil Nadu (181), and Andhra Pradesh (119), as per the data collated by India Today's Data Intelligence Unit (DIU).

So far, a total of 511 cases of sub-variant JN.1 have been reported in the country with the maximum recorded in Karnataka. Health officials told PTI that 199 cases had been reported from Karnataka, 148 from Kerala, 47 from Goa, 36 from Gujarat, 32 from Maharashtra, 26 from Tamil Nadu, 15 from Delhi, four from Rajasthan, two from Telangana and one each from Odisha and Haryana.

Five new Covid fatalities had been recorded in the country and 602 fresh cases in the last 24 hours. While two new fatalities had been recorded from Kerala, one each had been reported from Karnataka, Punjab, and Tamil Nadu.

In Kerala, one of the deceased was a 66-year-old man who was suffering from chronic liver disease, multiple organ dysfunction syndrome and sepsis, while the other one was a 79-year-old woman who had coronary artery disease and sepsis.

The number of daily cases of Covid had dropped to double-digits till December 5, 2023 but cases have again gone up. On December 31, the country recorded 841 cases, the highest in the recent past. However, in the next three days, cases came down slightly to 636 on January 1, 573 on January 2, and 602 on January 3.

The daily numbers were in lakhs during the peak of the Covid pandemic, which began in early 2020 and has seen more than 4.5 crore people getting infected and over 5.3 lakh deaths in about four years since then across the country.

The number of people who have recovered stands at over 4.4 crore with a national recovery rate of 98.81 per cent, according to the Health Ministry.