India crossed eight million COVID-19 cases after reporting 49,881 new cases in the last 24 hours. The country took 18 days to report 1 million new cases, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare's COVID-19 dashboard. The total COVID-19 case count in the country stood at 80,40,203, as of 8:00 am, October 29, 2020.
Currently, there are 6,03,687 active cases as the number of recovered cases has been surpassing the number of new cases daily since October 4. Over 7.3 million people have recovered from COVID-19 so far. Barring October 18, when the country reported 1033 deaths, the number of deaths reported have been less than a thousand since October 3. On October 26 and 27, the country reported less than 500 deaths, something which it has not witnessed since July, 2020.
The increase from 60 lakh to 70 lakh cases took 13 days while the increase from 70 lakh to 80 lakh cases took 18 days. This increase in duration is reportedly due to the decrease in the weekly average number of new cases reported by the country. In the week between October 23- October 29, India reported a daily average of 47,600 cases.
India is only the second country to surpass 8 million cases. Till the end of September, several experts believed that India was set to cross the US to become the country with the highest number of COVID-19 cases. However, the US has witnessed a new wave of increase in cases with the country reporting around 80,000 cases in the last week. According to the Johns Hopkins University dashboard, the US has over 88 lakh cases.
Even the European Hemisphere is witnessing a new surge in cases. French President Emmanuel Macron has announced a nationwide lockdown starting on Friday. UK, Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic have been reporting more than 10,000 cases daily.
India's growth to eight million comes in a period of 273 days as the first case was reported on January 30 in the country. The first million cases were reported in 169 days. India crossed the two million case- mark after recording the new million cases in a span of 22 days. The next million cases were reported in 16 days, 13 days to report the fourth million and five million mark was crossed in a span of 11 days. The six million cases mark was crossed after the country reported one million new cases in 12 days. The difference between six to seven million cases was only 13 days. The rise to eight million took the country 18 days, The infographic below shows India's trajectory from the first case reported on January 30 to crossing 8 million cases on October 28.
Mortality
Since October 4, the country has reported less than 1000 deaths. With 1290 new deaths on September 16, the country had reported its highest one-day COVID-19 deaths. In the last 24 hours, the country reported 517 new deaths. India's current mortality rate stands at 1.50%. The Ministry of Health aims to bring down this rate to less than one per cent. The country ranks third with 1,20,527 deaths after US - with over 2.27 lakh deaths - and Brazil with 1.58 lakh deaths.
Recovered and Active Cases
The country's recovery rate has risen to 90.99%. Over 1.3 million people recovered from COVID-19 in the same span of 18 days it took to record a million new cases in the country. The country has reported a higher number of recovered cases than new cases since October 3. Currently, India has around 6.03 lakh active cases and the rate of active cases is at 7.5 per cent.
Testing
India has conducted over 10.65 crore COVID-19 tests. These include the RT-PCR, Rapid Antigen Tests, TrueNat and CBNAAT tests. However, the government has not provided the breakdown of the number of tests under each category.
According to the World Health Organization, a country is said to have the pandemic under control if the positivity rate is at 5%. Positivity rate is the number of samples testing positive from the total samples that are tested for positivity. India's current overall positivity rate stands at 7.54% since the beginning of the pandemic while the weekly average between October 23-October 29 was 4.25%
Owing to the decrease in positivity and case fatality rate, Niti Aayog Member, Dr. V K Paul stated that India has the pandemic under control but needs to continue its tracking-testing-tracing-treating and quarantining measures diligently.
Representation Of States
Ten states including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Delhi, West Bengal, and Chhattisgarh represented 78% of the active cases detected in the country.
About 86% of the deaths reported in India come from the ten states of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Delhi, Punjab, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh.
Vaccines
While the clinical trials for Bharat Biotech and Zydus Cadilla's indigenous vaccine and Serum Institute of India's Phase III trials of the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine are underway, other vaccines are also going to be manufactured by Indian pharma companies.
Bharat Biotech's COVAXIN is set to recruit people for its Phase III trials.
Dr. Reddy's that signed up with the Russian vaccine received approval for Phase II/III trials after it was asked to resubmit its proposal by the Drugs Controller General of India.