Another grim milestone: India No .3 in total cases

COVID CRISIS India overtakes Russia; only US and Brazil ahead of it; recovery rate improves

NEWDELHI: With four consecutive days of record highs in new cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), India on Sunday went past Russia in total infections to become the third biggest hot spot of the virus, ranking only behind the US and Brazil.

The country reported 24,422 new cases and 421 new deaths on Sunday, taking the total number of infections to 697,284 and fatalities to 19,700.

With nearly three million cases and 132,000 deaths, the United States is the worst-hit country in the world, followed by Brazil, which has nearly 1.6 million cases and over 64,000 deaths, according to worldometers.info. Russia, now at the fourth spot, has 681,251 Covid-19 infections and 10,161 deaths. Peru was placed fifth with over 299,000 cases and 10,000 deaths on Sunday night.

Public health experts say that while India has a high Covid-19 caseload, its case fatality rate, at 2.8%, is much lower than the global average of 4.7%.

Another statistic that offers hope is that 424,596 patients, or 60.9%, have recovered from the disease — better than the global recovery rate of 56.6%. The recovery rate in India has been climbing steadily — it was 48% a month ago and 28.5% 30 days before that. This means that 36.4% of the total case count is currently “active”. Active cases are a crucial metric because they directly influence the patient load faced by the country’s health care infrastructure.

The three worst-hit states – Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Delhi – account for more than 60% of all cases recorded in the country, indicating how the virus has created urban hot spots of the infection. Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai have remained the cities with the highest numbers of infections, with 99,444, 84,524 and 68,254 confirmed Covid-19 cases (36.2% of the national tally) as of Sunday. Nearly 85% of all cases in the country can be traced to the 10 worst-affected states.

New Covid-19 cases have dropped substantially in China, the country where the pandemic originated, but surged in India and ravaged South America.

Experts say that in countries with weak health care systems and impoverished populations, fighting the virus has proven to be difficult.

Latin America has become the latest epicentre of the highly contagious disease, with Brazil and Mexico both reporting massive spike in cases over the past month.

In India, the latest 100,000 infections were recorded in just five days.