Eight states currently display an upward trend in daily new Covid-19 cases, the Union health ministry said on Friday as India’s count of Covid-19 patients under medical supervision approached 200,000 for the first time in over eight weeks.

The number of active Covid-19 patients nationwide increased on Friday to 197,237 from 189,226 on Thursday. The count had dropped below 200,000 on January 20 under a near steady fall since its peak of over a million cases in mid-September.

Maharashtra and Punjab show the sharpest rise in daily new Covid cases over the past four weeks, but counts have also increased in Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Health authorities have attributed the rise in several states to crowding, laxity in personal precautions and lowered levels of testing and contact tracing, but some epidemiologists believe viral genome sequencing needs to be intensified to determine whether faster-spreading mutants have any role.

“We need some explanation for what’s happening in Maharashtra — some parts of the state such as Pune which were among the hardest hit areas of the country shouldn’t be seeing the kind of rise that we’re seeing now,” D.C.S. Reddy, a community medicine specialist and member of the government’s Covid-19 epidemiology expert group, said.

Surveillance studies have suggested that in parts of Mumbai and Pune, the fraction of infected people is so high that the virus shouldn’t find it easy to spread as quickly and widely as it is now. But the surveillance also revealed even larger fractions of people susceptible to the infection and, health officials believe, the current growth appears to be driven by the virus spreading into this susceptible pool of the population.

Vaccination counts

India had till Friday evening administered over 28 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccines. Over 7.2 million healthcare workers, 7.2 million frontline workers, 7 million people aged 60 years or older and 1.2 million between 45 and 60 with health disorders have received their first doses. Over 4 million healthcare workers and nearly a million frontline workers have also received second doses.

Covishield, the AstraZeneca vaccine made by the Serum Institute of India, accounts for over 90 per cent of the doses administered so far. About 1.9 million people have received doses of Covaxin, the homegrown vaccine made by Bharat Biotech.