India crosses Canada’s Covid-19 tally, becomes 12th worst-affected country

India is now the 12th most affected country by the coronavirus pandemic, as the number of Covid-19 cases crossed the 70,000-mark on Tuesday.

According to the Union Health Ministry on Wednesday, the number of Covid-19 positive cases stand at 74,281 in the country. The ministry also said that 2,415 people have died due to the disease.

With these figures, India as crossed Canada’s tally, which has 69,156 cases of Covid-19, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) list. India is just below China now where the disease originated in December last year.

China has 84,451 cases of Covid-19 and 4,644 deaths related to the disease, according to WHO. The United States tops the list with more than 1.2 million Covid-19 positive cases and over 78,000 deaths. Spain, Russia, the UK, Italy, France, Brazil, Germany, Turkey and Iran are above China in the list.

According to the health ministry, India recorded an increase of 87 deaths and 3,604 cases of Covid-19 in the last 24 hours till Tuesday 8 am.

With 13 deaths, Delhi recorded highest number of Covid-19 deaths in a single day on Tuesday, which took the total toll in the city state to 86.

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan held a review meeting on Tuesday where he said that the doubling time of Covid-19 cases has now improved to 12.2 days in the country from 10.9 days.

Vardhan said that the fatality rate is 3.2 per cent while the recovery rate is progressively increasing and stands at 31.74 per cent.

The Centre, states and union territories are taking cohesive efforts to combat the coronavirus and “this provides us the assurance that the country is well-prepared to face any eventuality due to Covid-19”, he said.

The minister said the testing capacity has increased to 1 lakh tests per day with 347 government laboratories and 137 private labs.