With 3.45 lakh cases, India's single day COVID tally remains top in world

NEW DELHI: India's daily COVID cases continued to outdo other countries in the world on the third day in a row. The country recorded 345,147 fresh coronavirus new cases, pushing the overall caseload to 16,602,456 on Friday.

The country now has more than 2.55 million active cases.

Meanwhile, 2,621 more people succumbed to the infection, taking the nationwide toll to 189,549. According to Friday evening's tally, the maximum number of deaths were reported from Maharashtra at 773, followed by Delhi with 348 daily deaths as the national capital continued to grapple with a severe shortage of medical oxygen.

The six most affected states by total cases are Maharashtra (4,161,676), Kerala (1,322,054), Karnataka (1,247,997), Tamil Nadu (1,037,711), and Andhra Pradesh (997,462), Uttar Pradesh (976,765) and Delhi (956,348).

While Mumbai and Delhi have been hogging headlines, Bengaluru has emerged as the district with the highest number of active cases in the country, just under 1.5 lakh as of Thursday.

Five of the 10 districts with the highest number of active cases are in Maharashtra – Pune, Mumbai, Nagpur, Thane and Nashik, in that order. However, Hyderabad with over 94,000 has more active cases than any of these districts, data from covid19india.org shows. The other districts in the top 10 include Lucknow, Kamrup Metro (Guwahati) and Ahmedabad.

Of the total 8.9 lakh fresh cases reported internationally, a significant 37% were reported from India alone.