New Delhi: The death toll due to COVID-19 in the country rose to 1,783 while the number of cases climbed to 52,952 on Thursday, registering an increase of 89 deaths and 3,561 cases in the last 24 hours, the Union Health Ministry said.
The number of active COVID-19 cases stood at 35,902 while 15,266 people have recovered and one patient has migrated, it said.
“Thus, around 28.83 per cent patients have recovered so far,” a senior health ministry official said.
The total number of cases also include 111 foreign nationals.
A total of 89 deaths deaths have been reported since Wednesday morning, of which 34 people died in Maharashtra, 28 in Gujarat, nine in Madhya Pradesh, four each in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, three in Rajasthan, two each from Punjab and Tamil Nadu and one each from Delhi, Haryana and Orissa.
Of the 1,783 fatalities, Maharashtra tops the tally with 651 fatalities, Gujarat comes second with 396 deaths, followed by Madhya Pradesh at 185, West Bengal at 144, Rajasthan at 92, Delhi at 65, Uttar Pradesh at 60 and Andhra Pradesh at 36.
The death toll due to COVID-19 climbed to 35 in Tamil Nadu while Telengana and Karnataka have reported 29 fatalities each due to the disease. Punjab has registered 27 COVID-19 deaths, Jammu and Kashmir eight and Haryana seven.Kerala and Bihar have reported four deaths each.
Jharkhand has recorded three COVID-19 fatalities. Odisha and Himachal Pradesh have reported two deaths each.
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Meghalaya, Chandigarh, Assam and Uttarakhand have reported one fatality each, according to the ministry data.
According to the health ministry data updated in the morning, the highest number of confirmed cases in the country are from Maharashtra at 16,758 followed by Gujarat at 6,625, Delhi at 5,532, Tamil Nadu at 4,829, Rajasthan at 3,317, Madhya Pradesh at 3,138 and Uttar Pradesh at 2,998.
The number of COVID-19 cases has gone up to 1,777 in Andhra Pradesh and 1,516 in Punjab.It has risen to 1,456 in West Bengal, 1,107 in Telangana, 775 in Jammu and Kashmir, 693 in Karnataka, 594 in Haryana and 542 in Bihar.
Kerala has reported 503 coronavirus cases so far, while Odisha has 185 cases. A total of 127 people have been infected with the virus in Jharkhand and 120 in Chandigarh.
Uttarakhand has reported 61 cases, Chhattisgarh has 59 cases, Assam and Himachal Pradesh have 45 each, Tripura has 43 and Ladakh has registered 41 cases so far.
As many as 33 COVID-19 cases have been reported from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Meghalaya has registered 12 cases, Puducherry has nine, while Goa has seven COVID-19 cases.
Manipur has two cases. Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Dadar and Nagar Haveli have reported a case each.
“Our figures are being reconciled with the ICMR,” the ministry said on its website.
State-wise distribution is subject to further verification and reconciliation, it said.
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For three months, I have been crying hoarse on lack of adequate testing in India. No government/ media took notice! Now, Indians are paying for Modi governments’ blunders with their lives! Over 830,000 tests that had been done in the United States, as of Monday morning, which works out to about 1 in 400 people in the United States. South Korea had tested 1 in 130 people, as of Monday morning. As of yesterday, India has only tested 0.086% of its people. (1,191,946 ÷ 1,377,863,208)*100=0.086% (Total tests%Total Population; source:worldometer online portal). Compare that with Iceland’s 10%, Germany’s 2.5% and even the late comer, USA’s 1.8% (By the way, the percentages of those countries are two-three weeks old, so they may be higher now). When I say 0.08%, I am being generous. The actual percentage of India may be even lower (as low as 0.5%), because of India’s opaque testing data, we still don’t know how many of those tests were antibody tests (serum) and how many were antigen tests (swab).
India still has one of the lowest testing rates among Asian countries. India’s present testing rate stands at 802 tests per million. Pakistan is reportedly conducting 962 tests per million people, while Nepal is carrying out 2,166 and Sri Lanka, 1,254.
In many of my earlier comments, I have pointed out the various fiascos of Health Ministry (still lies about community-wide transmission, lack of adequate number of ventilators, lack of ICU beds, low or nonexistent private sector involvement, no national wide plan, with each state doing what it deemed best, poor funding of government hospitals), ICMR (imposing a highly restrictive testing criteria of testing only symptomatic travelers and failing to quickly change its course in time, failure to expand randomized testing, procuring 6,50,000 defective Chinese test kits of which only 4% worked by its own admission), NIV (either delaying/denying to grant regulatory licensing approval of 17 or so applications from Indian test kit manufacturers, in spite of roping few more institutes to validate their tests, remember that even FDA started issuing ’emergency authorizations’ without its validations due to urgency), NABL (completely ignored requests from Indian medical colleges to start testing by withholding its accreditation. It went to such an extent that a court case was filed to elicit a response from it!) and Modi’s Task Force (never functioned enough to take notice of it).
In contrast, On January 27, after four confirmed cases of COVID-19, South Korean health officials met with medical companies. The officials told the companies they needed them to develop tests for the Wuhan virus and that they’d rapidly approve new tests. A week later, the first test was approved. In comparison, the 17 applications from Indian diagnostic kit manufacturers were sitting on sarkari bapus’ desks from the month of February. They granted only three approvals, one as recent as end of April (nearly 3 month delay). South Korea was testing widely before community spread was even confirmed to be occurring in the country. ICMR couldn’t test widely to see how widely the coronavirus had penetrated into India due to lack of adequate number of test kits, which was a direct result of delaying the regulatory licensing approvals. That gave the virus a running start. ICMR let the window pass. Due to their proactive “test and trace” strategy, South Korea avoided having to implement the sort of mandatory lock downs implemented in India. India had to go into lock down because of ICMR’s and Modi’s Task Force’s failures! India should have been testing 100,000 people from the beginning of the lock down, not when the restrictions are about to get lifted. Even now, they are able to test only about 75,000 people per day. South Korea provides a counterfactual example of what could have happened if India had tested early and wider. ICMR is now playing a catch-up game! With a disease that exhibits a quicker progression, the beneficial effects of lock down has become meaningless. The common people’s sacrifice has gone completely to waste. After wasting more than one month of lock down, the fool of a PM is asking for a new template, when successful templates have already been established by South Korea, Taiwan, Germany and New Zealand. One has to only copy them. Only a divine intervention can save the Indians!