65K cases in a day, HealthMin says due to high testing

Close to 65,000 coronavirus cases were detected in the past 24 hours, taking India’s overall cases past 21.5 lakhs till Sunday morning, as per the health ministry’s data. The biggest contributors to this single-day spike are Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, which have reported over 10,000 cases in a day, while Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka,

Bihar and West Bengal too have started detecting a high number of cases.

Delhi, where the numbers had fallen impressively, is again reporting a high number of cases. Delhi’s health minister, however, said the rise in Delhi’s numbers was due to people from outside coming for testing and treatment, which was adding to its tally.

Union health ministry officials said such high numbers of positive cases were due to increased testing. In a new high, India has scaled the peak of conducting more than seven lakh tests in a single day — 7,19,364 tests were done in the past 24 hours. India has so far done 2,41,06,535 tests.

“Such high levels of testing will also lead to a high number of daily positive cases, but the states have been advised to firmly focus on comprehensive tracking, prompt isolation and effective treatment. Several meetings have

been held in the past week to engage with states that are showing a higher fatality rate,” health ministry officials said.

They added that such an approach of high testing has started showing results and recoveries are also increasing exponentially — India recorded the highest number of recoveries in a single day, with 53,879 patients having recovered and discharged on Saturday. With this, the total number of recovered cases touched a high of 14,80,884 on Sunday.

“This is more than twice the number of active cases (6,28,747). The number of recovered cases has touched another high of 2.36 times the active cases, which are all under medical attention either in home isolation or in hospitals,” officials said.

With a higher number of recovered patients, the recovery rate is 68.78 per cent. The case fatality rate has fallen to 2.01 per cent, though 43,379 deaths were reported so far, of which 861 were in the last 24 hours.