India’s tally 330k+, 2,255 new deaths

NEW DELHI: A day after India became the world’s worst Covid-19 hot spot ever, the country again broke all previous records on Thursday, adding 332,394 new cases and 2,255 new deaths amid a massive second wave of infections that has continued to exceed all global peaks and overwhelmed the nation’s health care system.

Till Thursday night, 16,257,091 people are confirmed to have been infected with the disease in the country, of which 186,948 lost their lives.

The seven-day average of new cases in the country now stands at 264,838 infections a day. This means that the country, on average, is currently reporting nearly thrice as many cases as it was during the absolute worst of the first wave – India’s first wave of cases peaked at 93,617 for the week ending September 16, 2020, according to HT’s Covid-19 dashboard.

On average, 1,800 people have lost their lives to the disease in the country every day in the last week. In the same period, nearly two million people (1,969,347) have been infected in the country.

The positivity rate – the proportion of tests that are positive for Covid-19 – continued to soar, with nearly one out of every five samples tested across the country returning positive.

Delhi, meanwhile, lodged a record 306 deaths due to the disease and registered 26,169 new cases with an alarmingly high positivity rate of 36.2%, the highest ever recorded since the start of the pandemic in March last year.