India marks new record with 97,570 Covid-19 cases in 24 hours
New Delhi, Sep 12 (efe-epa).- India continues to break its own daily record of confirmed Covid-19 cases with 97,570 fresh infections registered in the last 24 hours, surpassing the previous record made two days ago, according to official figures on Saturday.
With these new infections, the total number of cases since the start of the pandemic has exceeded 4.6 million in India, the second worst-hit country in terms of the number of Covid-19 infected people after the United States.
However, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in its reported, chose to highlight that the country had “scaled yet another peak” of single day recoveries, with 81,533 people cured in last 24 hours. Total recoveries now amount to 3.6 million.
Of the fresh coronavirus cases, it underlined that about 60 percent came from just five of India’s 36 states and territories, with the western state of Maharashtra – whose capital is Mumbai – accounting for more than 24,000 infections, the highest in the country.
India has increased its coronavirus testing capacity in recent months. In the last 24 hours, it conducted more than one million tests (55.1 million in total), which in turn has also contributed to more cases being confirmed.
India also recorded 1,201 Covid-19 related deaths in the last 24 hours, taking the total number to 77,472, which represents 55 deaths per million inhabitants, according to data from the World Health Organization, far below the 635 deaths per million in Spain, 917 in Peru and 573 in the US.
At the moment, the world’s second-most populous country with 1.35 billion people in the world has an average of 3,306 cases per million inhabitants, much lower than that of the US that has 19,045, or that of Spain with 11,852 or Peru with 21,314, according to WHO data.
However, India has not been able to flatten the contagion curve.
Although its numbers are relatively low, considering its large mass of people population, the speed of the spread threatens to make India the epicenter of the disease.
Amid an alarming health crisis in the country with the largest poor population in the world, India’s economy has also collapsed, declining by 23.9 percent compared to the same period of the previous year, following months of coronavirus-induced lockdown imposed at the end of March.
The restriction forced hundreds of millions of people out of their jobs and paralyzed almost all of the sectors, plunging the GDP growth to its lowest level in history.
The government began easing the lockdown in a phased manner from June to put its economy back on track even as the number of cases continued to surge.
The de-escalation of lockdown is in its fourth phase with a large part of its sectors already running. EFE-EPA
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