Daily Covid cases rise in 5 states

As the country sees a surge in new Covid-19 cases registering nearly 14,000 cases in 24 hours on Saturday, the Centre has said that five states — in Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh — have seen a rise in daily cases.

According to Union health ministry data updated on Saturday, daily Covid-19 cases in the country climbed to about 13,993, highest in 22 days, taking India’s tally to 1,09,77,387, while the recoveries surged to 1,06,78,048. The death toll increased to 101 daily new fatalities, the data updated at 8 am showed.

Maharashtra continues to report the highest daily new cases at 6,112. It is followed by Kerala with 4,505 while Tamil Nadu reported 448 new cases. Only two states – Maharashtra and Kerala account for 75.87% of total active cases. In last 7 days, Chhattisgarh has also seen a rise in daily active new cases.

A police team from Delhi on Saturday arrested a 35-yearold man from Basta in Odisha’s Balasore district on the charges of online fraud and duping an export and import company of the national capital. The accused, identified as Sanmay Panda, was held by Delhi’s Amar Colony police with assistance of their Basta counterparts. Senior police officials said three mobile phones, three laptops, huge quantities of electronics items like printers, scanners, cartridges, hard disks, stolen automobile items and over 100 mobile SIM and Aadhar cards had been seized from Panda’s possession. As per reports, Panda was operating one Aadhaar card correction and kiosk banking sub-centre in the name of Digital Seva at Basta. He allegedly cheated several customers by doing fraudulent transactions from their bank accounts as he used to store biometric data of the customers who came to his centre. It is alleged that Panda had fraudulently withdrawn `54,000 from the bank account of an elderly woman by finger print withdrawal and subsequently a case against him was registered by Basta police.