The gap between coronavirus disease (Covid-19) recoveries and active cases continues to widen, with the recoveries currently more than three times the active cases, the Union health ministry announced on Monday.

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As opposed to 2,280,566 recovered cases in the country to date, there are 707,668 active cases, shows health ministry data. Active Covid-19 cases are the current disease burden of the country.

“This is because of effective implementation of Centre-led policies ensuring efficient clinical management in hospital settings for critical patients, and supervised home Isolation for moderate and mild ones,” the health ministry tweeted on Monday morning.

The widening gap has led to active cases becoming about 23.24% of the total positive case reported in the country so far. The first case was diagnosed positive on January 30, this year. The Covid-19 recoveries have also touched 75% (74.90%).

“It is indeed a result of all the efforts that government has made to manage the outbreak. We are detecting Covid-19 infections early; for which credit largely goes to enhanced testing apart from robust surveillance system in place. We have managed quite well given the large population size of India,” said Dr VK Paul, member (health), Niti Aayog.

Even though overall deaths related to Covid-19 are moving closer to 60,000, the case fatality rate (CFR), that dropped below 2% a week ago, now stands at 1.86%, which is among the lowest as compared to other countries.

“Deaths have definitely reduced and we don’t see too many patients needing ventilator support. One of the reasons for it could be that cases are being detected early and reaching hospital well in time. The treatment starts well before they reach the critical stage. In fact, most of the positive cases do not require hospitalization these days, as these are being managed well at home,” said Dr Yatin Mehta, chairman, critical care department, Medanta Hospital.

Doctors treating Covid-19 patients also say that now they know better what works on these patients.

“We now know the disease better than what we knew at the start of the pandemic. There are more treatment options open before us and we know things like steroids are working very well in saving lives. There are other supportive therapies that we are now confident about,” said Dr Srikant Sharma, senior consultant, Moolchand Hospital.

“Knowing a disease better helps in overall disease management, which is why we are able to save more lives than before,” he added.