India crossed five million COVID-19 cases after it reported 90,123 new cases in the last 24 hours. It took the country only 11 days to report 10 lakh new cases.
India has been reporting the highest daily-spike in cases globally since August 7. The country is 15 lakh cases away from US' total case count.
In terms of mortality, India reported an average of 1168 deaths daily in the past seven days raising the country's death toll to 82,066. US and Brazil have over 1,95,542 and 1,33,119 deaths and occupy the top two positions in number of COVID-19 deaths.
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It took the country 169 days to report the first million but the difference in the number of days in reporting the subsequent four million cases has only been decreasing. 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 as the country breached the three million mark. It took the country 13 days to deport the fourth million while the fifth came in a span of 11 days.
The infogram below shows India's trajectory from the first case reported on January 30 to crossing 5 million cases on September 15.
Testing
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.
For the week ranging from September 10- Sep 16, India's average positivity rate rose to 8.54%. The testing capacity has increased in the country to over 11 lakhs. Maharashtra with a positivity rate of 21.5%, Andhra Pradesh with a positivity rate of 12.9% and Karnataka with a positivity rate of 12.1% have been asked to increase their testing capacities by the Central government.
Representation Of States
In a press conference held on Tuesday, Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan shared that the five Indian states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh account for 60% of the total COVID-19 cases.
Maharashtra has been reporting a daily spike in the number of cases and deaths. The state with a total of 10,97,856 cases, has 27,983 cases more than Russia which has the fourth highest number of cases globally on the basis of geographical boundaries of countries
Vaccine Candidates
Two Indian indigenious vaccines– one by Bharat Biotech and the other by Zydus Cadilla are in Phase I/Phase II trials across the country.
After AstraZeneca halted the trials of the Oxford vaccine, Serum Institute of India halted its trials too. AstraZeneca resumed its trials in the UK owing to which the Drugs Controller General of India permitted SII to start trials too. The approval came on Tuesday evening, according to PTI.
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