India crossed ten million COVID-19 cases after reporting 25,152 new cases in the last 24 hours. The country took 29 days to report 1 million new cases, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare's COVID-19 dashboard. The total COVID-19 case count in the country stood at 1,00,04,599 as of 8:00 am, December 19, 2020.
The active cases have been decreasing daily since November 28. Currently, there are 3,08,751 active cases in the country. The number of recovered cases has been consistently higher than the number of newly detected cases. Over 9.5 million people have recovered from COVID-19 so far. From reporting over 1000 deaths daily, the country now reports lesser than 400 deaths daily. The country reported 347 deaths in the last 24 hours.
The increase from 90 lakhs to 1 crore cases took a period of 29 days, the second longest duration taken by the country to report new million cases. The testing number has been fluctuating between 8.5 lakhs to 12 lakhs over the past month.
India is only the second country to surpass 10 million cases. Till the end of September, several experts believed that India was set to cross the US to become the country with the highest number of COVID-19 cases. However, the US has witnessed a new wave of increase in cases with the country reporting over 2 lakh cases daily in the last week. According to the Johns Hopkins University dashboard, the US has over 170 lakh cases. It took the country only five days to report a new million. Even the European Hemisphere is witnessing a new surge in cases. France, UK, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic have been reporting more than 10,000 cases daily.
India's growth to ten million comes in a period of 323 days as the first case was reported on January 30 in the country. The first million cases were reported in 169 days. India crossed the two million case- mark after recording the new million cases in a span of 22 days. The next million cases were reported in 16 days, 13 days to report the fourth million and five million mark was crossed in a span of 11 days. The six million cases mark was crossed after the country reported one million new cases in 12 days. The difference between six to seven million cases was only 13 days. The rise to eight million took the country 18 days while it took the country 21 days to reach nine million cases. With its tracking, testing, treating, measures, it took the country 29 days to report the latest million.
The infographic below shows India's trajectory from the first case reported on January 30 to crossing 10 million cases on December 18.
Mortality
Since October 4, the country has reported less than 1000 deaths. With 1290 new deaths on September 16, the country had reported its highest one-day COVID-19 deaths. In the last 24 hours, the country reported 347 new deaths. India's current mortality rate stands at 1.45%. The Ministry of Health aims to bring down this rate to less than one per cent.
The country ranks third with 1,45,136 deaths after US - with over 3.13 lakh deaths - and Brazil with 1.85 lakh deaths.
Recovered and Active Cases
The country's recovery rate has risen to 95.46%. Over 1.12 million people recovered from COVID-19 in the same span of 29 days it took to record a million new cases in the country. The country has reported a higher number of recovered cases than new cases since November 28. Currently, India has around 3.08 lakh active cases and the rate of active cases is at 3.09 per cent.
Testing
India has conducted over 16 crore COVID-19 tests. These include the RT-PCR, Rapid Antigen Tests, TrueNat and CBNAAT tests. In its press conference on November 10, the government announced that 46 per cent of the testing was conducted by RT-PCR while 49 per cent tests were through rapid antigen. According to the World Health Organization, a country is said to have the pandemic under control if the positivity rate is at 5%. Positivity rate is the number of samples testing positive from the total samples that are tested for positivity. India's current overall positivity rate stands at 6.25% since the beginning of the pandemic while the weekly average between December 13-December 19 was 2.44% Owing to the decrease in positivity and case fatality rate, Niti Aayog Member, Dr. V K Paul stated that India has the pandemic under control but needs to continue its tracking-testing-tracing-treating and quarantining measures diligently.
Vaccines
Serum Institute of India, Bharat Biotech, and Pfizer have sought approval for emergency use authorization in India. Trials for vaccines by Zydus, Sputnik, Gennova, Biological E are also underway.
India intends to vaccinate over 30 crore people in its first phase of vaccine trials.