India recorded a one-day jump of 45,576 cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) on Thursday, after reporting less than 39,000 daily infections for the past three days, according to the Union ministry of health and family welfare. The country’s infection tally has surged past 8.95 million while the death toll has reached 131,578.
Of the total 8,958,483 cases, as many as 8,383,602 people have been discharged from Covid-19 designated hospitals or have recovered from the viral infection in home isolation. The daily recovery figure saw a jump of 48,493 on Thursday, taking the recovery rate to 93.58%, according to the health ministry’s dashboard.
Even as the toll has mounted to 131,578, India’s new deaths per million due to coronavirus disease in the past seven days has continued to remain the lowest in the world at 3, according to a graph shared by the health ministry on Twitter. While the world’s average of seven days stood at eight, France reported the maximum number of new deaths per million at 62 followed by the United Kingdom at 43.
India’s active caseload stands at 443,303, which is 4.95% of the total confirmed cases in the country, the ministry said.
Meanwhile, an indigenously developed testing kit based on the gene-editing technology CRISPR – called Feluda – will be launched in Delhi on Thursday by the Tata group in collaboration with the Apollo group of hospitals, according to people familiar with the matter. The test is likely to be cheaper than the current gold standard RT-PCR and equally accurate, helping in scaling up Covid-19 testing as it would need a machine that is widely available with laboratories and science institutions.
The global infection tally has gone up to 56,187,563 with the United States continuing to report the maximum number of Covid-19 cases at 11,525,540. The virus has claimed 1,348,600 lives across the globe, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tracker.
