With fresh additions, India’s total coronavirus toll crossed thirty lakh mark on Sunday. As per the latest figures, the country reported 70,812 fresh infections in past 24 hours, taking its total number of infections to 30,41,463. With 914 new deaths on Saturday, the total number of patients who lost their lives to Covid-19 in India reached 56,837.
India became the third country in the world, after the US and Brazil, to record more than 3 million covid-19 cases. The number of cases in the country continue to rise as pathogen find hotspot across the country, halting the efforts by the government to curb the virus.
However, with increased number of cases, India’s recovery rate has ascended to 74.69 per cent and the fatality rate has also dropped further to 1.87 per cent, the Union Health Ministry stated.
Over the past few weeks, India has also ramped up its testing process. On Friday, a total number o 10,23,836 samples were tested, the highest done in a day so far. Now, the cumulative total of tested sample stands at 3,44,91,073.
Meanwhile, in other news, Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Saturday said that India’s first vaccine against the novel coronavirus will most likely be available by the end of this year.
“One of our COVID-19 vaccine candidates is in the third phase of the clinical trial. We are very confident that a vaccine will be developed by end of this year,” Dr Harsh Vardhan said.
“I am happy to say that in the eighth month of the battle, India has the best recovery rate of 75 per cent. A total of 2.2 million patients have recovered and gone home and another seven lakh are going to be cured very soon. We started with only one testing laboratory in Pune but we scaled up our diagnostic capabilities and strengthened our testing capacity. Today, India has 1,500 testing labs for COVID-19 and on Friday we tested over one million samples” the minister added.
Globally, 22,949,234 people have been infected with the virus so far, including over 7.9 lakh who have succumbed to it. The United States followed by India and Brazil remains the worst hit country.
