India’s total coronavirus cases surged past five million on Wednesday, ministry of health and family welfare data revealed, after India reported a single-day jump of 90,123 over the last 24 hours.
India is the second country in the world to report more than five million total positive cases after the United States.
With the fatality rate decreasing to 1.64 per cent, which is below the global average of 3.16%, the death toll rose to 82,066, after 1,290 people succumbed to the virus on Tuesday.
The total caseload of India is closing in on the United States, which has reported more than 6.6 million cases. It is reported that with this per cent of the surge, India is likely to surpass the US within weeks.
According to data available with the ministry, India took 167 days to reach ne million cases. The second million was reached in just 21 days, faster than the US and Brazil.
Moreover, the country is testing over one million people every day but the experts have hinted that this is not enough since the infection rate is higher.
The active cases in the country account at 998,757, after over 90 thousand contracted with the virus. According to data available, India now accounts for nearly one-sixth of the total Covid-19 cases worldwide.
The centre on Tuesday said that India has “learnt from the experience of nations” that suffered high mortalities. India was able to “distribute the curve” of coronavirus infections due to the nationwide lockdown enforced at the end of March, government officials said during the Union health ministry’s weekly Covid-19 press briefing on Tuesday.
“The US and European nations experienced a peak, then the cases dropped down and now there’s a second wave there. We took our lesson from the first wave there. We distributed the curve in a way that we did not have many deaths. It was because we had an effective lockdown, we did not have a huge peak at all,” said Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) director-general Dr Balram Bhargava.