Thiruvananthapuram, Jul 28 (IANS): The Union Health Ministry data on Wednesday morning showed that Kerala has 22,129 new Covid cases in the last 24 hours while the total cases in India stood at 43,654.

This means that Kerala had more than 50 per cent of the cases and this is the first time that this has happened.

With regards to the active cases nationally, on Tuesday there were 3,99,436 cases, while in Kerala there were 1,45,371.

Likewise the test positivity rate for Tuesday nationally stood at 2.51 per cent while in Kerala it was 12.35 per cent.

However, this issue had surfaced in the Kerala Assembly on Tuesday when veteran legislator P.K. Kunhalikutty of the opposition IUML slammed Vijayan for what was happening on the Covid front in Kerala, and said there is something wrong in the decisions of the monitoring committee which overlooks the Covid affairs on a daily basis.

But Vijayan defended the way things are being managed and blamed the opposition for always being on a fault finding fact mission. He said on Tuesday that 80 per cent of the population in many states have been affected with Covid, while in Kerala it's only 49 per cent.

Incidentally, during the first wave, Kerala was the cynosure of all eyes from across the world on how the state was fighting the pandemic and the then State Finance Minister Thomas Issac had gone to the extent of stating that this was a feather in the cap of how the first Pinarayi Vijayan government had managed.