India sees surges in daily COVID cases amid 'variants of concern' reported in several states

Amid "variants of concern" and rampant flouting of safety norms for COVID being reported in several states over the past few days, India on Thursday recorded a slight surge in it daily COVID cases.

According to the Union Health Ministry's dashboard, India recorded 45,892 new cases of Covid-19 and 817 new deaths on Thursday. With this, the country's cumulative Covid-19 infection tally went up to 3,07,09,557 and the total death toll was pushed to 4,05,028.

The fresh cases have pushed the country's total Covid caseload to over 3.07 crore. The daily positivity rate is 2.42 per cent, less than 3 per cent for 17 straight days.

After Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have the highest number of infections.

Health secretary Rajesh Bhushan has written to eight states with high positivity rates, urging them to take immediate action to bring down cases and also share details of the actions taken as per the Disaster Management Act.

The states that have received the communication sent out by health ministry are Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Kerala, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Odisha and Sikkim. These states have the maximum number of districts with above 10% positivity.

Meanwhile "variants of concern" of coronvirus have been found in 174 districts in 35 states and union territories, the Union health ministry said on Wednesday. Maharashtra, Delhi, Punjab, Telangana, West Bengal and Gujarat have seen the highest number of these cases.

The health ministry data further showed that the number of active cases went up to 46,07,04, or 1.50 per cent of the total cases and the total number of recoveries stood at 29,843,825, with 44,291 people being discharged in the last 24 hours.

The number of tests done during the previous day was 19,07,216.

Meanwhile, the global death toll from COVID-19 eclipsed 4 million Wednesday as the crisis increasingly becomes a race between the vaccine and the highly contagious delta variant. The tally of lives lost over the past year and a half, as compiled from official sources by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the number of people killed in battle in all of the world's wars since 1982, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.