Coronavirus: With approval to two Covid-19 vaccines, India is set to start an inoculation drive soon.
New Delhi:
India logged 16,375 fresh COVID-19 cases in the last 24 hours taking its overall coronavirus tally to 1.03 crore, government data shows. In this period, 201 people also died of Covid pushing the overall deaths to 1.49 lakh.
Almost 29,000 people – double of new infections – also recovered over the past one day.
With this, country’s active cases continued their downward spiral and the number of those receiving treatment dropped to 2.31 lakh.
Even as India’s daily Covid case count remained under 20,000 infections, Kerala reported its first six cases of the UK coronavirus strain.
More cases of the highly virulent strain were detected in other states – eight in Maharashtra, five in Uttar Pradesh, three in Karnataka – taking its overall cases in India to 38.
All known cases of the new strain are among UK returnees; they are in institutional quarantine.
In Tami, Nadu’s Chennai, another luxury hotel became a Covid cluster as 20 of its resident staff members tested positive. On Sunday, the novel coronavirus was detected in 85 employees of the ITC Grand Chola, their family and neighbours, prompting the health authorities to do a saturation test in all hotels across Chennai.
Maharashtra, Kerala and Chhattisgarh emerged as the country’s worst hit states with almost 4,800, 3,000 and 1,100 fresh infections. The daily case count across states has dropped drastically with Tamil Nadu and Karnataka emerging a distant fourth and fifth with about 800 and 600 cases, respectively.
A similar drop in daily deaths is also being seen across states. In an indication of the improving situation, Maharashtra – which has highest overall Covid-related deaths – continued to log the most day-on-day fatalities which was 29. At its peak, this number was well above 500 for the state.
