With 4.2 million Covid-19 cases, India pips Brazil to take second slot after US
10 Sep 2020
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India added 90,802 new cases of Covid-19 in the past 24 hours ended 8 am in the morning today (7 September), taking its total number of coronavirus hit people in the country to 42,04,613, to become the second-most corona hit country after the United States and relegating Brazil to third spot.
The country now has the second-largest number of confirmed cases in the world, 4,204,613, and, with nearly one lakh cases added every day, the country looks set to beat most-affected United States as well.
India has so far reported 71,642 deaths, the third-highest in the world.
The surge in reported infections has mostly come from five states. More than 60 per cent of the active cases are in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.
The spike comes as the government continues to lift restrictions to try to boost an economy that lost millions of jobs when the virus hit in March.
For the last seven days India's caseload has galloped, adding more than 75,000 daily infections per day.
Cases have also begun spiking in the capital, Delhi, as well, with more than 3,200 infections recorded on Sunday, the city's highest in more than two months.
An upsurge of Covid-19 in many rural areas has also led to an uptick in numbers.
The rise in cases is also partly reflects increase in testing - the number of daily tests conducted across the country has risen to more than a million.
Although India has a low death rate from the disease, nearly 1,000 deaths have been recorded every day from across the country for the last seven days.
India imposed stringent lockdown in March in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus, whose numbers were only in the hundreds then.
It began to ease curbs in phases since June to promote economic activity, even as cases continued to spike.
The pandemic and the lockdown caused massive disruptions to economic activity during the quarter. India's economy shrank by 23.9 per cent in the three months to the end of June, the worst slump since the country started releasing quarterly data in 1996.
A health ministry release said the total number of recovered cases in India have crossed 3.25 million today, with 69,564 patients being discharged in the last 24 hours. The recovery rate touched 77.31 per cent while case fatality rate has declined to a new low of 1.70 per cent today.
