India’s Covid-19 tally over 11 million, death toll at 156,385

India’s tally of the coronavirus disease went past the 11 million mark on Monday, a little over two months after the world’s second worst-hit country recorded 10 million infections in December last year, according to the data released by the Union ministry of health and family welfare. There were 14,199 new Covid-19 cases and 83 related deaths in the last 24 hours, the health ministry dashboard showed at 8am. Its active caseload has risen to 150,055 after dropping considerably this month. The country has clocked 11,005,850 cases and 156,385 deaths so far.

The Centre on Sunday wrote to states and Union territories advising them to step up testing to contain the spread of the virus at the earliest amid a rise in the number of active Covid-19 cases. It asked states to work on five major areas—improve the overall testing numbers by focusing on increasing the proportion of RT-PCR tests, refocus on strict and comprehensive surveillance as well as stringent containment in selected districts, regular monitoring of the mutant strains through testing followed by genome sequencing and monitoring of the emerging cluster of cases, focus on clinical management in districts reporting higher deaths and all negative rapid antigen test results to be mandatorily followed by RT-PCR test. 

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Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, the Centre has said, are areas of concerns and pointed out that there are more than 74% of the active cases are in the southern and western states. Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray warned of another lockdown on Sunday warned people over the surge in the cases of the coronavirus disease in the state and a looming second wave.

Thackeray also said that the government will review the need for a fresh lockdown after eight days. He, however, announced a ban on religious, social, political programmes in the state starting Monday and empowered the local administration to impose curbs. Many districts such as Amravati, Yavatmal, Akola, Nashik, Pune imposed stricter curbs in the wake of the rising cases over the last two weeks.

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“It will be known in next 8-15 days whether it is a second wave. We had been struggling to face it during the first wave because of the poor health infrastructure, but it will be worse if witnessed another peak of the cases. I am worried about the severity of the second wave if it occurs in the state,” he said during his virtual address.

The country had seen its Covid-19 tally crossing the 2 million mark on August 7, 3 million on August 23, 4 million on September 5 and 5 million on September 16. On September 28, it went past 6 million, 7 million on October 11, crossed 8 million on October 29, 9 million on November 20 and surpassed 10 million on December 19.

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With 9,695 discharges between Sunday and Monday morning, 10,699,410 patients of the coronavirus disease have been cured so far and the national recovery now stands at 97.21%.

The dashboard also shows that 11,116,854 people have been given the vaccine against the coronavirus disease so far.