From Our Bureau
17th SEPTEMBER 2020
India witnessed a big spurt with 97,894 fresh COVID-19 positive cases reported on Thursday, the highest ever single-day tally, taking the country’s cumulative cases to 51,18,253. The death toll rose to 83,198, with 1,132 fatalities recorded in the last 24 hours. The case fatality rate dropped to 1.63 percent today.
Incidentally, India has moved to the second place now in total number of COVID-19 positive cases among the countries across the world. It ranks next to the United States in overall number of cases. India now ranks third in total number of fatalities, after the United States and Brazil, which occupy the top two slots. Moreover, the daily tally of cases and deaths in India is the highest among all the countries across the globe now.
Meanwhile, India has been registering very high recoveries for two consecutive days. More than 82,000 COVID patients have been cured and discharged in the past two days. 82,961 active cases were found free of COVID in the last 24 hours.
Spurred by this number of very high recoveries, the national Recovery Rate continues to follow its rising curve. It stands at 78.64 percent today.
More than 40 lakh (40,25,079) patients have recovered so far. Recovered cases have exceeded Active Cases today by more than 30 lakhs (30,15,103), and are four times the latter.
These high levels of recovery have resulted in a 100 percent increase in the number of recovered cases in the past 30 days.
Maharashtra (17,559) contributed more than one-fifth of the new recoveries (21.22 percent) while the States of Andhra Pradesh (10,845), Karnataka (6,580), Uttar Pradesh (6,476) and Tamil Nadu (5,768) contributed 35.87 percent of the new recoveries. These States together account for 57.1 percent of total new recoveries.
The total number of active cases in the country has crossed 10 lakhs (10,09,976) as on date, accounting for 19.73 percent of the total confirmed cases.
Close to half (48.45 percent) of the Active Cases are concentrated in 3 States; Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Together with the States of Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, these 5 States contribute nearly 60 percent of the total active cases.
As many as 1,132 case fatalities have been reported in the past 24 hours. With 474 new cases of mortality, Maharashtra accounted for more than 40 percent of the new deaths. Four other four States of Uttar Pradesh (86), Punjab (78), Andhra Pradesh (64) and West Bengal (61) contributed 25.5 percent of the fatalities in the last 24 hours. (eom)
