India crossed seven million COVID-19 cases after reporting 74,383 new cases in the last 24 hours. The country took 13 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 70,53,806 at the time this report was filed.
Currently, there are 8,67,496 active cases as the number of recovered cases has been surpassing the number of new cases daily since October 4. Over 6 million people have recovered from COVID-19 so far.
The increase from 50 lakh to 60 lakh cases took 12 days while the increase from 60 lakh to 70 lakh cases took one extra day i.e. 13 days. This increase in duration is reportedly due to the decrease in the weekly average number of new cases reported by the country. In the week between October 5- October 11, the daily average of new cases recorded stands close to 72,000.
India ranks only behind the US which has reported over 77 lakh cases. Despite ranking second in the world, India is showing the fastest growth in total number of cases. Experts believe that the country is likely to cross the US' count of total COVID-19 cases by the end of October. Even though the number of cases is decreasing in India while they see an increase in US, the difference in new cases reported daily in both the countries is over 20,000.
India's growth to seven million comes in a period of 255 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 infographic below shows India's trajectory from the first case reported on January 30 to crossing 7 million cases on October 10.
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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 918 new deaths. India's current mortality rate stands at 1.54%. The Ministry of Health aims to bring down this rate to less than one per cent.
The country ranks third with 1,08,334 deaths after US - with over 2.14 lakh deaths - and Brazil with 1.50 lakh deaths.
Recovered and Active Cases
The country's recovery rate has risen to 86.17%. Over a million people recovered from COVID-19 in the same span of 13 days it took to record new cases in the country. The country has reported a higher number of recovered cases than new cases since October 3.
Currently, India has around 8.6 lakh active cases and the rate of active cases is at 15 per cent.
Testing
India has conducted over 8 crore COVID-19 tests. These include the RT-PCR, Rapid Antigen Tests, TrueNat and CBNAAT tests. However, the government has not provided the breakdown of the number of tests under each category.
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. Since reporting six million cases, India conducted over 1.4 crore tests with an average positivity rate of 6.59%. To follow the WHO's definition of having the pandemic under control, the country has to increase its testing capacity.
Representation Of States
Kerala has recorded more cases than Maharashtra in the last 24 hours. Maharashtra has been reporting the highest cases in the country for the past several months. Ten states including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Delhi, West Bengal, and Chhattisgarh represented 80% of the new cases detected in the last 24 hours.
Vaccines
While the clinical trials for Bharat Biotech and Zydus Cadilla's indigenous vaccine and Serum Institute of India's Phase III trials of the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine are underway, other vaccines are also going to be manufactured by Indian pharma companies. Both Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute of India have partnered with international pharmaceuticals to manufacture vaccines that would be administered intranasally.
Dr. Reddy's was asked by the Indian drug body to resubmit its proposal for conducting clinical trials for the Sputnik vaccine.
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