After continuous fall since the Sep 17 peak, daily Covid-19 cases in India have been rising over the past five consecutive days, especially in the states of Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, raising fears of second wave of the pandemic. The rise in the number of cases was reported amidst the discovery of several new variants of the novel coronavirus in Maharashtra that are believed to be more transmissible than the prevailing variants, reported the timesofindia.com Feb 20.
While 18 states didn’t report any Covid-19 deaths in the last 24 hours and the national positivity rate — now at 5.22 per cent — has been showing a steady decline over the last 13 days, there is a spot of worry: the five states have been reporting an upsurge in daily cases, the indianexpress.com Feb 21 cited India’s Health Ministry as saying Feb 20.
The ndtv.com Feb 20 cited Dr Shahshank Joshi, member of Maharashtra’s Covid Task Force, as saying 240 new strains of the virus had surfaced across India, which were behind the fresh surge of infections the state has been witnessing since last week.
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Meanwhile, the latest data from India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare show that there were 14,264 new Covid-19 cases and 90 new deaths in the country in the past 24 hours as of Feb 21 at 8 AM, taking their cumulative totals to 10,991,651 cases and 156,302 deaths respectively.
A total of 10,689,715, or 97.25%, had recovered while the number of active cases was 145,634, or 1.32% of the total. The case fatality remained at 1.42%. Except for the unchanged fatality rate, the percentage figures for both the recoveries and active cases have worsened over those of the previous day.
The latest daily number of new cases, at 14,264, was more than the daily number of those who had recovered, at 11,667, again leading to an increase in the number of active cases, by 2,507.
Thirteen states – one more than yesterday – have reported more than 100 new cases in the last 24 hours, namely Maharashtra (6,281), Kerala (4,650), Karnataka (490), Tamil Nadu (438), Punjab (352), Chattisgarh (263), Gujarat (258), Madhya Pradesh (257), West Bengal (193), Telangana (163), Delhi (152), and Uttar Pradesh (113), Haryana (111).
Six states have reported 4 or more Covid-19 deaths in the last 24 hours, namely Maharashtra (40), Kerala (13), Punjab (8), Tamil Nadu (6), Karnataka (5), and Madhya Pradesh (4). 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 number of Covid-19 cases among Tibetans in India, Nepal and Bhutan has remained unchanged for the second day at 1,530. Of them 1,458 had recovered, 31 were active and 41 had died, according to the tally of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) as of Feb 20.
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Across the world the number of Covid-19 cases totaled 111,133,590 and the deaths 2,461,688, according to the tally of Johns Hopkins University as of 3:55 PM on Feb 21, 2021.
