Maintaining its decline in daily infection and positivity rate, Odisha on Sunday clocked 2,970 new COVID-19 positive cases in the last 24 hours while 4.01% Test Positivity Rate (TPR) was reported today as against yesterday’s 4.07% in a marginal dip improvement in the pandemic situation in the coastal State.

The COVID situation in western districts bordering Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand has considerably improved while the daily infection and positivity rate in coastal districts continue to remain high in a cause of worry for health authorities.

The government has divided 30 districts of the state into ‘A’ and ‘B’ categories when it announced extension of the partial lockdown on June 30 for 15 more days till 5 AM on July 16.

Twenty districts where the test positivity rate (TPR) remains less than five per cent are in the ‘A’ category, while the remaining 10 coastal districts, where the number of cases is high, are in the category ‘B’.

Odisha’s COVID-19 tally mounted to 9,21,896 while 1,652 cases were reported from quarantine centers on Wednesday with the remaining 1,218 new infections being sourced from the local transmission. With 42 fresh fatalities, the overall death toll has jumped to 4,196.

The Cuttack district topped the daily Covid chart with highest 440 cases in the last 24 hours, followed by Khordha (384), Balasore (240), Jajpur (191), Mayurbhanj (164), Kendrapara (157), Bhadrak (128), Jagatsinghpur (112) and Nayagarh (105).

Of the 42 fatalities recorded in the last 24 hours, Khordha district reported eight fatalities followed by five from Bargarh, four from Sundargarh, three each from Angul, Jharsuguda, Sambalpur and Ganjam, two each from Dhenkanal, Jagatsinghpur, Jajpur, Kalahandi, Puri and Nayagarh and one from Keonjhar.

Odisha now has 30,227 active cases, and 3,158 people were cured of the disease on Saturday, taking the total number of recoveries to 8,87,420.

The State has so far tested over 1.39 crore samples for COVID-19, including 71,554 on Saturday with the State’s overall positivity ratio at 6.57 per cent.

As many as 22 are in the green zone where the test positivity rate is below five per cent and active cases remaining below 1,000 mark while 3 districts-Khordha, Cuutack and Balasore- are tagged red zones with 3,000 active cases.

The State’s recovery rate currently stands at 96.20% while the active cases account for 3.27% of total positive cases registered in the State.

The State’s share is 3.03% in the country’s confirmed virus caseload while the active cases are 5.99% of India’s total active cases. The number of cured patients accounts for 3% of the country’s total recovery. Odisha has so far reported 1.05% of the country’s Coronavirus deaths.

Odisha’s tryst with the pandemic had begun on 15 March last year with detection of the first case while on 27 May 2021; Odisha’s caseload had crossed the nine lakh mark. On 1 May this year, the State had recorded over 10,000 fresh cases for the first time on a day since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.