29% of world’s new Covid cases in India

NEW DELHI: The country’s share in global Covid-19 numbers hit a new peak on Sunday, when 29% of all new cases worldwide and 21% of all deaths from the virus reported on the day were from India. On both counts, India had the largest share in the world on the day.


India has the highest share of global cases so far this month, with a cumulative count of 5,19,351 cases in the first nine days of August. The US has recorded 4,93,376 cases during this period and Brazil 3,69,284. The previous highest share of India in the daily global count was on August 3, when it accounted for 25% of all cases and 18.6% of all deaths, as per data from Worldometers.info and India’s state governments.

India’s death toll from the virus crossed 45,000 on Monday, when 885 fresh fatalities were recorded. This was a dip from Sunday’s record high count of 1,007 deaths. Fresh cases too dipped sharply from 63,851 on Sunday to 51,285 on Monday. This was in keeping with the trend of cases showing a decline every Monday, mostly owing to lower testing on Sundays. The number of tests conducted across the country on Sunday (for which results would have come the next day) was less than 4.8 lakh, a huge drop from the nearly 7.2 lakh tests on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu went past two grim milestones when the state’s total caseload crossed 3 lakh and deaths topped 5,000 — both counts are the second highest in the country after Maharashtra. TN added 114 deaths and 5,914 cases on Monday, which pushed the cumulative toll to 5,041 and the case tally to 3,02,815.

Since August 1, the state has reported 1,106 deaths, 22% of the total fatalities.

A day after reporting the highest deaths and over 12,000 daily cases, Maharashtra reported a dip in cases and deaths on Monday. The state reported 9,181 cases and 293 deaths, taking the total cases to 5,24,513, and fatalities to 18,050. The cases reported on Monday were the lowest in the last 5 days.

Officials said cases on Monday are generally lower as the number of tests on Sunday are also fewer.