(TibetanReview.net, Oct17’20) – There have been at least 8,008,402 cases of coronavirus in the United States so far while concern is mounting in Europe as countries smash records for daily coronavirus cases, reported the edition.cnn.com Oct 16 and 17 while India, still the country reporting the world’s highest daily number of new cases, has seemingly curved its infections graph.
Countries in Europe that managed to contain infection rates through spring lockdowns and began relaxing measures were watching the virus return with a vengeance, with Germany, France and the Czech Republic all reporting record case numbers in the past two days, noted the Oct 16 report.
“The fall/winter surge continues to unfold in Europe with exponential increases in daily cases and matching percentage increases in daily deaths,” WHO Europe director Hans Kluge was quoted as telling a news briefing Oct 15.
Currently four countries have reported more than one million Covid-19 infections thus far, with the other three being India with over 7 million cases, Brazil with over 5 million cases and Russia with over 1 million cases.
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Meanwhile in the sharpest fortnightly dip in cases and deaths, India saw an 18% fall in new infections from the previous 15-day period while deaths fell by nearly 19% in the first half of October, reported the timesofindia.com Oct 17.
Both the case count and the number of deaths had peaked in the first half of September. In that fortnight, the country had recorded 13,31,660 fresh infections (a 28.7% rise over the previous fortnight) and 16,641 deaths, up 15.4% from the previous 15 days, the report noted.
The pandemic is clearly on the wane, but with more than 1 million new cases and over 13,000 deaths during the fortnight, the Covid crisis in India seems far from over, the report noted.
And mirroring the fall in numbers, active cases in the country dipped below the 8-lakh mark on Oct 16 for the first time since Aug 31, the report noted. This level of active cases previously existed around the end of August, noted the indianexpress.com Oct 17.
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The latest data from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare show that there were 62,212 new cases and 837 new deaths in the country in the past 24 hours as of Oct 17 at 8AM, taking their totals to 7,432,680 cases and 112,998 deaths.
A total of 6,524,595, or 87.78%, had recovered while the number of active cases was 795,087, or 10.70% of the total. The case fatality rate was 1.52%. These were almost all improvements over the previous day’s figures.
The country has been recording less than 75,000 new infections daily for the nine consecutive day and fatalities below 1,000 for 13 straight days.
The latest daily number of new cases, at 62,212, was less than the daily number of those who had recovered, at 70,816, leading to a decrease in the number of active cases by 9,441. Not only has the number of active cases remained below nine lakh for the ninth day, it has also fallen below 8 lakh for the first time in one and half months, the dailypioneer.com Oct 17 cited India’s ministry of health as saying.
India is currently the country with the world’s second highest number of Covid-19 cases and the third highest number of deaths.
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Four states, namely Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu have accumulated more than 670,000 cases each in that order.
Seven other states, namely Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Delhi, West Bengal, Odisha, Telangana, and Bihar had more than 200,000 each in that order.
Seven other states, namely, Assam, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Chattisgarh, Haryana, and Punjab had reported more than 120,000 cases each so far in that order.
Three other states/ Union Territories, namely Jharkhand, Jammu & Kashmir, and Uttarakhand had reported more than 57,000 cases each so far in that order.
Seven more states/Union Territories, namely Goa, Puducherry, Tripura, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, Chandigarh, and Arunachal Pradesh, reported more than 13,000 cases each in that order.
Besides, there were seven other states/Union Territories with a total more than 2,000 cases each, namely Meghalaya, Nagaland, Ladakh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Sikkim, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Mizoram in that order.
Maharashtra also had the most number of deaths at 41,502 (↑837); followed by Tamil Nadu and Karnataka with more than 10,300 deaths each; Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh with more than 6,300 deaths each; Delhi and West Bengal with more than 5,900 deaths each; Punjab and Gujarat with more than 3,600 deaths each; Madhya Pradesh with more than 2,700 deaths; Rajasthan, Haryana, Chattisgarh, Jammu & Kashmir, Telangana, Kerala, and Odisha with more than 1,100 deaths each; Bihar, Assam, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand, with between 981 and 829 deaths each, and so on in that order.
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The total number of Covid-19 cases among Tibetans in India, Nepal and Bhutan had remained unchanged at 703 (↑0), of whom 410 were active, 276 had recovered and 17 (↑0) had died, according to the tally of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) as of Oct 17.
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Across the world the number of Covid-19 cases totaled 39,378,961 and the deaths 1,105,120, according to the tally of Johns Hopkins University as of 3:54 PM on Oct 17, 2020.
