COVID-19 cases reach 4 million in India

Relatives, graveyard workers and volunteers lower the coffin of a COVID-19 victim during a funeral at a graveyard in New Delhi on August 26, 2020. — AFP file photo

India became the world’s third country to pass four million coronavirus infections, setting a new record daily surge in cases on Saturday as the crisis showed no sign of peaking.

The 86,432 new cases took India to 4,023,179 infections, third behind the United States which had more than 6.3 million and just trailing Brazil on 4.1 million.

While the government eased restrictions in a bid to revive the economy, India now had the world’s fastest growing number of cases at more than 80,000 a day and the highest daily death toll at more than 1,000.

The country’s caseload had gone from three to four million in just 13 days, faster than the United States and Brazil.

The pandemic was now spreading through rural areas which have poor health facilities but was also resurging in big cities like Delhi and Mumbai.

Maharashtra state, which includes Mumbai, had been at the centre of the crisis in India since a nationwide lockdown was imposed in March. It still accounts for nearly a quarter of the new daily cases across the country of 1.3 billion.

Shamika Ravi, an economics professor and former government advisor who closely followed pandemic trends in India, said that India was ‘nowhere close’ to a peak and Maharashtra must become the ‘focus’ of the campaign against the coronavirus.

‘There is no controlling COVID-19 in India without controlling the outbreak in Maharashtra,’ she said on Twitter.

‘Given its economic significance, Maharashtra will continue to influence the spread of infection elsewhere in the country,’ she added.

AFP