NEW DELHI — India reported 259,551 cases of COVID-19 on Friday, bringing the country's total caseload past 26 million. The country has recorded roughly 1 million cases since Monday.

Friday's tally brings India's total number of confirmed coronavirus cases to 26,031,991, according to figures from the Indian health ministry.

The country has seen a slight drop in new daily cases in the past week following several weeks of more than 300,000 infections per day.

Meanwhile, 4,209 more deaths from the coronavirus epidemic were recorded, bringing the death toll to 291,331. After a decline on Thursday, the single-day deaths once again crossed the 4,000-mark.

The number of fatalities reported each day in the country has been consistently above 3,000 since April 28.

There are currently 3,027,925 active cases recorded in the South Asian country, a drop of 101,953 cases in the past 24 hours. The number of daily active cases has been on the decline over the past few days after a continuous surge since mid-April.

A total of 22,712,735 COVID-19 patients have been cured and discharged from hospitals so far in the country.

A total of 191.8 million vaccine doses have been administered since the country began its vaccination program on Jan. 16.

The federal government has ramped up COVID-19 testing facilities across the country, with over 324.4 million tests having been conducted till Thursday, including 2,061,683 tests on Thursday alone, showed the latest data issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Friday.

Three COVID-19 vaccines are being administered to the people in India. The AstraZeneca/Covishield vaccine manufactured by Serum Institute of India (SII) was supplied to all states, and India's indigenous Covaxin vaccine manufactured by Bharat Biotech was supplied to 12 of the Indian states.

The third one is Russia's Sputnik V vaccine. — Agencies