NEW DELHI: India reached yet another grim COVID-19 milestone on Saturday when it overtook Spain to become the fifth worst-hit country in the global pandemic.
With a total of 2,46, 628 confirmed cases, the country is now behind only US, Russia, Brazil and the UK.
The new cases getting added to the existing pool of cases are breaking previous day’s record almost everyday now and the trend continued on Friday when 9,971 fresh cases—another highest single-day tally—got registered.
Also, 287 cases deaths were reported in a day, taking the total death toll due to the infectious disease in the country to 6,929.
On a good note, the country has also declared 1,19, 293 patients as having “recovered” while 1,20, 426 patients are active.
In last 24 hours, 2,739 cases were diagnosed in Maharashtra, the most badly affected state in the country in the pandemic, taking it total case tally to 82, 968. The state has lost 2,969 lives to Covid 19 cases so far with 120 new deaths reported on Friday.
The consistently high number of deaths have also been reported from Delhi which, at 761, has seen the third-highest deaths in the pandemic in India and 53 new deaths were recorded within a day.
From Gujarat, which has 19,592 confirmed cases, 29 overnight deaths were reported till Saturday morning taking the state’s death tally to 1,219. The state has the highest case fatality ratio due to Covid 19 in India which experts have been saying could be results of late detection and improper medical management of patients.
In the country, a total of 46,66, 386 RTPCR tests, to detect the presence of the virus in suspected patients have been conducted so far with 1,42, 069 tests conducted in 24 hours.
But many feel that given India’s huge population this needs to be ramped up further quickly and in order to detect cases early, trace their contacts and isolate them and also treat the patients who are moderately or severely sick.
Samples tested per million in the country stands at 3074.4 while the incidence per million is 157.2