WORLD’S WORST OUTBREAK
NEW DELHI: With 315,909 new cases of Covid-19 in India on Wednesday, the country broke not only all its previous daily records, but also earned the grim distinction of reporting the most single-day infections in any country ever.
After Wednesday’s tally, the seven-day average of new cases in the country now stands at 264,838 a day – higher even than America’s third wave, which peaked at 255,961 cases a day for the week ending January 11. This means that India is not only the largest outbreak in the world right now, but also the largest outbreak ever recorded in the world.
A total of 2,102 people lost their lives to the viral disease across India on Wednesday, also the single-day record for the country, as the relentless expansion of the outbreak under the second wave continued to spark shortages of hospital beds and other crucial supplies such as oxygen and medicines.
Till Wednesday, 15,924,697 confirmed Covid-19 infections and 184,693 deaths have now been reported across the country, according to HT’s dashboard.
The previous record for most cases in a single day anywhere in the world was set when the US, which is the world’s worsthit country with 32.5 million cases and 582,000 deaths, reported 307,581 new cases on January 8, 2021, according to global case data tallied by worldometers.info.
The most worrying factor right now remains how fast daily cases are continuing to grow, and how the trajectory is exhibiting no clear signs of approaching a peak still.
The country’s daily case tally crossed the 100,000 mark for the first time on April 6 when 115,320 new infections were reported. It just took another nine days for the daily case tally to breach the 200,000 mark for the first time (there were 216,913 new cases on April 15). From there, it took only six days to cross the 300,000 mark.
The daily case trajectory has now grown 62% in the last week. If this rate of case increase continues, then the country is on the pace to be reporting an average of half a million cases every day in as little as 10 days, shows data.
The average positivity rate – the proportion of tests that return positive for Covid-19 – has now soared to 17% in the past week, the highest ever recorded in the country.
This number, which is a crucial statistic that shows how prevalent the virus is in society, is rising still – on Tuesday (the latest data for which national testing numbers are available) 18% of tests came back positive.
The trend is similar in most of the country – weekly average positivity rate is rising in all of India’s 20 most populous states, despite the testing rate being the highest ever maintained.