(TibetanReview.net, Mar18’21) – India has recorded this morning nearly 35,900 new Covid-19 cases over the past 24 hours, the highest in the last 102 days. Maharashtra continued to be the worst affected state, accounting for 64% of the daily count in the country.
There were 70 districts in 16 states where there had been more than 150% rise in Covid-19 cases from Mar 1 to 15, the PTI news agency Mar 17 cited the government of India as saying.
The silver lining in the current second wave of Covid-19 infections is that there is much lower hospitalisation and death rates as compared to last year, the Indianexpress.com Mar 18 cited health officials as saying, speaking about the situation in worst-hit Maharashtra state.
The report quoted Dr Rakesh Mishra, Director of the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, as saying, “There is no clear indication that the surge is largely due to a particular variant. At the moment, the prime cause of the surge could simply be a combination of few super spreader events and the fact that in most places Covid-appropriate behaviour is not being followed.”
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The latest data from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare show that there were 35,871 new Covid-19 cases and 172 new deaths in the country in the past 24 hours as of Mar 18 at 8 AM, taking their cumulative totals to 11,474,605 cases and 159,216 deaths respectively.
A total of 11,063,025, or 96.41%, had recovered while the number of active cases was 252,364, or 2.20% of the total. The case fatality remained at 1.39%.
The latest daily number of new cases, at 35,871, was substantially higher than the daily number of those who had recovered, at 17,741, leading to a big jump in the number of active cases by 17,958.
Seventeen states have reported more than 100 new cases in the last 24 hours, namely Maharashtra (23,179), Kerala (2,098), Punjab (2,013), Karnataka (1,275), Gujarat (1,122), Tamil Nadu (945), Chattisgarh (887), Madhya Pradesh (832), Haryana (555), Delhi (536), Rajasthan (313), Telangana (278), Uttar Pradesh (260), Andhra Pradesh (253), Chandigarh (201) and Himachal Pradesh (167).
Ten states have reported 3 or more Covid-19 deaths each in the last 24 hours, namely Maharashtra (84), Punjab (35), Kerala (13), Tamil Nadu (8), Chattisgarh (6), Karnataka (4), Haryana (4), and Telangana (3), Delhi (3), and Gujarat (3). The rest of the states have reported 2 or less deaths.
India is currently the country with the world’s second highest number of Covid-19 cases and the fourth highest number of deaths in cumulative numbers.
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The cumulative total of Covid-19 cases among Tibetans in India, Nepal and Bhutan has risen by 11 to reach 1,623. Of them 1,498 had recovered, 80 were active and 45 had died, according to the tally of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) on Mar 17.
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Across the world the number of Covid-19 cases totaled 121,256,160 and the deaths 2,681,790, according to the tally of Johns Hopkins University as of 2:57 PM on Mar 18, 2021.
