New Delhi: The Indian government on Friday said the recovery rate of COVID-19 positive cases has increased to 49.47 percent and a total of 1,47,194 individuals have recovered from the deadly disease. India has become the fourth worst-affected country due to the pandemic as it added around 10,000 cases for the fourth consecutive day and surpassed the UK's tally to record 2,97,535 COVID-19 cases so far.

The Health Ministry said that 6,166 individuals have recovered of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours. The doubling rate also improved from 3.4 days at the beginning of lockdown to 17.4 days now.

On Thursday, Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said that India's recovery rate, i.e. number of recovered patients as compared to total cases, has reached 49.21 percent.

He had also added that the total number of recoveries has exceeded the total number of active cases in the country.

At the outset, the Cabinet Secretary held a video conference with Chief Secretaries, Secretary Health and Secretary Urban Development of all the states on Friday.

States were advised to focus on containment, testing and tracing, health infrastructure up-gradation, case clinical management and community engagement for effective management of COVID-19.

States were asked to also pay special attention to the emerging epicentres and undertake stringent containment measures so as to check the spread of virus.

They were advised that active house-to-house surveillance through Special Teams in containment zones is critical for early identification of cases.

They were requested to expedite up-gradation of hospital infrastructure so as to manage the cases as per projections besides ensuring sufficient logistics (e.g. pulse oximeters), and trained human resources (doctors, staff nurses, non-clinical staff).

It was emphasized that going forward preventive measures are extremely important especially for vulnerable populations i.e. elderly and co-morbid patients.

Timely referrals, based on symptoms and improving clinical practices with the help of Centres of Excellence in collaboration with AIIMS, Delhi was also stressed.

The states were requested to undertake extensive community outreach to encourage social distancing and promotion of Covid appropriate behaviour in the community at all times.

ICMR has further ramped up the testing capacity for detecting the Novel Coronavirus in infected persons.

A total of 877 labs are presently operational (637- government labs and 240 - private labs) in the country. 1,50,305 samples were tested in the last 24 hours. A total of 53,63,445 samples have been tested thus far.