India crossed 20 lakh COVID-19 cases as it reported 62,568 new cases in the last 24 hours. The country doubled its case count from a million to two million in only 22 days. For nine straight days, India has been recording over fifty thousand new cases.
It took 169 days for the country to report the first million cases. The country also increased its testing capacity in the same period. India has tested over 2.27 crore samples as of 9 am on August 7, 2020. The country's doubling rate increased by two days as the country took 20 days for the cases to double from 5 lakh to 10 lakh and has taken 22 days to double the number of cases to 20 lakh.
India reported its first case on January 30 and took 110 days to report the first one lakh cases. The subsequent rise in one lakh cases up to twenty lakh cases are shown in the graph below.
In moving towards the next million, the country recorded the highest number of new cases globally on August 4, 5 and 6, according to the WHO situation reports. USA and Brazil, the only other countries with cases higher than India have been reporting fewer new cases. On August 5, Brazil reported only 16,641 cases, a decrease from the over 40 thousand daily cases the country was reporting which increased to 51,603 on August 6. In a 5-day average daily cases dashboard by Johns Hopkins University, India is the only country wherein the curve is not plateauing.
With 1370 labs carrying out RT-PCR, TrueNat and CBNAAT tests under the Indian Council of Medical Research, over 6,39,042 samples were tested on August 6 of which 62,568 tested positive. The positivity rate of the country, thus stands, at 9.79%. The WHO believes that if the positivity rate stands at 5%, the number of tests being conducted in the country are adequate. In a video interview, WHO Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan mentioned that India's testing rates were lower than that of other nations and needed to be improved.
Increasing daily cases in Maharashtra (11,514), Andhra Pradesh (10,328), Karnataka (6805), Tamil Nadu (5684) Uttar Pradesh (4586) emerge as issues of concern. Delhi which was reporting less than 1000 cases between August 3 and August 5 is again reporting over 1000 cases since the past two days.
Three vaccine candidates have received approval for trials in India. Two indigenious vaccines by Bharat Biotech and Zydus Cadila have begun Phase I/II trials while Serum Institute of India has received approvals for Phase II/III trials of the Oxford vaccine.
Also Read: Explained: Are Human Challenge Trials For COVID-19 Ethical?
The recovery rate in the country is improving as the country has been reporting over 40,000 recoveries daily from August 2. In the last 24 hours, the country reported 49,769 recoveries raising the number of recovered cases to 13,78,105 which is 2.2 times the number of currently active cases. Currently, the country has 6,07,384 active cases.
With regards to the case fatality rate, which measures the number of deaths over the total number of confirmed cases, India reported 886 deaths in the last 24 hours raising the total number of fatalities to 41,585. India ranks fourth in the total numberof deaths with USA, Brazil, Mexico staking claims at the top three locations. India's current case fatality rate stands at 2.05%
Also Read: Coronavirus LIVE Update: India's Cases Rise To 20,27,074; 41,585 Dead
