India on Tuesday crossed the 5.5 million mark in terms of number of coronavirus disease cases. But the Union health ministry said that the country’s active cases are less than a fifth of the total tally.

Addressing a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, health secretary Rajesh Bhushan said that the number of Covid-19 related fatalities in India per million population is among the lowest in the world. “It stands at 64 for India and 123 for world,” said Bhushan.

He also said that daily recoveries from Covid-19 are more than the number of new infections reported per day since past four consecutive days.

“We get swayed by the narrative that India has over 50 lakh cases, but we forget that nearly 45 lakh people have already recovered,” the health secretary said.

“India has highest number of recovered cases of Covid-19 in the world – 44,97,867,” he added. The ministry had earlier said that the country registered over 1 lakh Covid-19 recoveries in the last 24 hours, the highest number of single-day recoveries.

The government’s data said that India’s Covid-19 cases share is 17.7 per cent of global infections, while those who have recuperated are 19.5 per cent of total recoveries in world.

The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) in the country currently stands at 1.59 per cent.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), CFR is a measure of the severity of a disease and is defined as the proportion of reported cases of a specified disease or condition which are fatal within a specified time.

With a spike of 75,083 new cases and 1,053 deaths in the last 24 hours, India’s Covid-19 count crossed 55 lakh on Tuesday morning.