For the fourth day in a row, coronavirus cases in India jump 200,000
A COVID-19 patient waits inside an autorickshaw to be admitted to a government hospital in Ahmedabad, India. AP
India reported a record daily increase of 261,500 COVID-19 infections over the last 24 hours, taking the nationwide tally to 14.8 million, health ministry data showed on Sunday.
India's deaths from COVID-19 rose by 1,501 to reach a total of 177,150, the data revealed.
More than 140.18 million people have been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and 3,142,002 have died, according to a Reuters tally.
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Infections have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019.
The second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in India is different from the first one in September 2020 as the rate of increase in new cases is significantly higher.
The second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in India is different from the first one in September 2020.
The Lancet Covid-19 Commission India Task Force said in a report that the increase from 10,000 to 80,000 new cases per day from February to April took place in less than 40 days.
Last September, this journey took 83 days.
The second differentiator is that many more of the cases testing positive are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic, resulting in relatively low rates of hospitalisation and mortality.
The report said it is not entirely clear if the higher proportion of asymptomatic cases are entirely due to better contact tracing (more family members, for example, being tested).
The overall Case Fatality Ratio (CFR) since the beginning of pandemic in March 2020 has been reported to be around 1.3 per cent, while the CFR among patients who have contracted the virus since the starting of 2021 is far less at 0.87 per cent.
