India sees record surge of over 95,000 new coronavirus cases

New Delhi, Sep 10 (efe-epa).- India on Thursday reported a new record jump of 95,735 Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours, taking the country’s total caseload to nearly 4.5 million.

According to data from the federal ministry of health, there were 4,465,863 infected people in the country of 1.35 billion inhabitants.

The disease, according to the official data, also claimed 1,172 lives in the last 24 hours from Wednesday morning, bringing the total number of Covid-19 fatalities to 75,062.

While India is the second worst-hit country in terms of the number of infected people its death toll is the third-highest in the world behind the United States (190,815) and Brazil (128,539).

Still, India’s death rate at 1.7 percent, according to John Hopkins University, is among the lowest in the world.

At the moment, the second-most populous country in the world has an average of 323 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, much lower than that of the US that has 1,925, or that of Spain with 1,144.

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.

India’s daily increase in cases has been 2.1 percent while the US, Brazil, and Russia have seen a 0.6 percent spike in the number of infections.

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-inducted 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.

The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, has said that it would continue trials of the potential anti-Covid-19 vaccine prepared by AstraZeneca, although the United Kingdom-based pharma company has decided to suspend trials elsewhere. EFE-EPA

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