Coronavirus / India records over 50k daily COVID-19 cases for a week, total reaches 19L

New Delhi: India’s tally of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) ballooned to more than 1.9 million after 52,509 new cases and 857 deaths were reported in the last 24 hours, Union health ministry’s data showed on Wednesday.

The country has been recording more than 50,000 Covid-19 cases for the last one week or since July 30 and has added more than 2 lakh infections since the beginning of this month. The number of active cases stands at 586,244 and the tally is at 1,908,254 till date.

According to the health ministry’s dashboard, 1,282,215 patients—51,706 people between Tuesday and Wednesday morning—have been cured of the viral disease and the recovery rate stands at 67.19%. The recovered cases in India are now double the active cases.

The death toll has climbed to 39,795. The government has said that India has registered the lowest case fatality rate (CFR) since the first lockdown at 2.10% as compared to the global average.

“The mortality analysis of the present data shows that 50% of deaths have happened in the age group of 60 years and above; 37% deaths belong to 45 to 60 years age group; while 11% deaths belong to 26-44 years age group,” the health ministry said on Tuesday.

“This clearly highlights the people above the age of 45 belong to the high-risk group and the country’s containment strategy is focusing on this group. In the gender-wise distribution, 68% of people who died were men and 32% were women,” it said.

Rajesh Bhushan, the secretary with the health ministry, said on Tuesday more than 20 million Covid-19 tests have been conducted in the country and more than 660,000 tests were done in the last 24 hours.

The health secretary said 24 states and Union territories fared better on Monday than the national average of 15,119 tests per million. Goa leads with 84,927 tests per million, followed by Delhi having conducted 57,855 tests per million population. This indicates that many states and UTs have increased their testing capacities, Bhushan said.

Also, 28 states and Union territories are performing more tests than the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) guideline of 140 tests per day per million population. The country, on an average, is conducting 479 tests per day per million population.

Maharashtra continued to add to the country’s infection tally as it recorded 450,196 Covid-19, including 15,842 deaths, according to the health ministry. In Tamil Nadu, there were 263,222 cases of the viral disease and Delhi recorded 138,482 cases so far.

Active cases of Covid-19 in Delhi dropped below the 10,000-mark for the first time in over two months on Tuesday, the same day that the number of daily deaths also touched a two-month low, data showed.

The Capital recorded 674 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, taking the total number of infections in the Capital to 139,156, according to the Delhi government’s health bulletin.

Globally, 18.4 million people have been infected by Sars-Cov-2, which causes the coronavirus disease, and 699,575 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tracker.