India’s daily Covid-19 tally above 117,000, highest in over 7 months
New Delhi, Jan 7 (EFE).- India added 117,100 new coronavirus infections and over 300 deaths on Friday, the highest in more than seven months, indicating a record-breaking pace of the virus outspread that exceeds the devastating second wave in April-May last year.
The federal health ministry said the new infections in the last 24 hours pushed the active caseload to 371,363 in the crowded country of 1.35 billion people.
The official data showed that 302 patients lost their lives to the disease over the past day.
The last time the country added more than 100,000 infections was on June 6 (114,000), when the second wave of the virus spread had already begun receding from a peak of more than 400,000 cases a day.
The speed at which the number of Covid-19 patients has been increasing is staggering, particularly after the health authorities detected the first cases of the highly infectious Omicron variant of the virus.
Ten days ago, the number of daily injections was less than 10,000.
Experts predict that the Omicron-driven third wave of Covid-19 infections would peak at 500,000 to one million cases a day, even as nearly half of the eligible population is fully vaccinated.
About two-thirds of the people have received their first dose of the anti-coronavirus vaccine.
The western state of Maharashtra, whose capital is Mumbai, and the National Capital Territory of Delhi are among the worst-hit region with 36,265 and 15,097 news cases, respectively.
Delhi has recorded the highest number of new cases in eight months. A month ago, the capital region recorded less than 50 infections a day.
But the hospitalizations of new Covid-19 patients remain low compared to the second wave when overwhelmed health centers struggled with a crippling shortage of medical oxygen and diseased persons scrambled for beds in hospitals.
The Delhi government said the city reserved 12,580 hospital beds for Covid-19 patients.
However, only 1,100 coronavirus patients occupied them. Twenty-four were on life support.
It is almost half the number of hospitalizations the city had in April at the beginning of the second wave when it registered a similar number of patients.
The virus has claimed 483,178 lives in less than two years, infecting more than 35.2 million people of the country with some of the most densely populated cities in the world. EFE
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