Daily cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) surpassed the 40,000 mark for the first time since the outbreak on Sunday, taking the national tally of infections past 1.1 million, with the latest 100,000 cases being reported in three days.
India reported 40,118 new cases and 675 deaths on Sunday, taking the total number of cases to 1,116,597, and deaths to 27,487.
While the spread of the virus, Sars-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, is beginning to show signs of plateauing in some urban epicentres of the contagion such as Delhi, other regions such as Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Bihar have started showing spikes in daily new cases.
Nearly half the new cases on Sunday came from three states, Maharashtra (9,518), Tamil Nadu (4,979) and Andhra Pradesh (5,041) – all record single-day highs. Several states and UTs such as Uttar Pradesh (2,211 new cases), West Bengal (2,278), Bihar (1,412), Rajasthan (934) and Jammu and Kashmir (701) reported record single-day case spikes on Sunday.
Delhi reported 1,211 new cases, Karnataka 4,120 and Telangana 1,296, according to respective state bulletins.
In the past week, until July 19, India recorded more than 34,000 new cases a day on average, compared to 26,000 a week before a statistic that highlights the rate of cases growing in the country.
Experts have said that the focus of the battle against the virus now needs to shift to rural parts of the country that traditionally have been beyond the reach of adequate health care mechanisms, and where new hot spots are now feared to surface.
The number of recovered Covid-19 patients in India has crossed 700,000, with the recovery rate standing at 62.7%.
As of Sunday, the country had 388,786 active cases and the case fatality rate (CFR) the proportion of people who have died among known infections was 2.5%, against the global average of 4.2%.
The US, which has 3,859,590 cases and 143,042 deaths, has a fatality rate of 3.7%; and Brazil, with 2,076,635 cases and 78,871 deaths, is at 3.8%.
Amid an increase in the number of new cases recently, several states such as Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh have announced reimpositions of lockdowns of various degrees in several districts to curb the spread of the outbreak.
