E-Paper
India’s Covid-19 cases hit 300,000 mark
More than 57% of all coronavirus cases in India can be traced to just three states – Maharashtra, Delhi and Tamil Nadu.
India became only the fourth country in the world -- after the United States, Brazil and Russia -- to report more than 300,000 cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) on Friday, 103 days since the start of the outbreak in the country, with the latest 100,000 cases added in just the last 10 days, according to HT’s Covid-19 dashboard.
The country reported 11,172 new cases and 384 new deaths on Friday, taking the total number of cases to 309,324, and deaths to 8,882.
More than 57% of all cases in India can be traced to just three states – Maharashtra, Delhi and Tamil Nadu — a fact that highlights how the spread of the virus in the country has largely been centered in a handful of hot spot regions.
While the last 100,000 cases surfaced in only 10 days; the previous 100,000 cases took 15 days; and the first 100,000 cases took 78 days. A little under a quarter of all cases have been reported just in the last week, with the total cases doubling over the last 17 days.
An identical trajectory is also seen in the number of fatalities with more than a quarter of deaths coming in just the past week. At an average, 329 deaths have been reported every day in the past week. This number was 238 in the seven days before that. The case fatality rate (CFR) in the country stood at 2.9%, significantly lower than the worldwide figure of 5.6%.
As of Friday, 154,150 patients had recovered from Covid-19, which means that nearly half (49.8%) of people who had been infected have since been discharged from hospitals. In fact, just this Tuesday, the number of recovered patients in the country outnumbered the number of active cases for the first time. As of Friday evening, there were 146,292 active cases in India.
In terms of the areas in the country that have become the hot spots of the pandemic, we see that Maharashtra, Delhi and Tamil Nadu – the three worst-hit states – account for more than 58% of all cases. If one includes Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh into the mix, it would account for nearly three out of every four cases in the country.
Globally, more than 7.3 million infections of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, and 420,000 deaths has been reported since the virus was first reported in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of last year.
