With over 2.9 lakh Covid-19 cases, India is now the fourth worst-hit country

India has overtaken the United Kingdom to climb the fourth spot in the list of nations worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic, according to a website that tracks the number of cases across the world.

Worldometer data on Thursday evening showed that India had 295,772 cases against 291,588 infections recorded by the UK and it took just 18 days for the Asian country to reach the fourth spot.

Only the US, Brazil and Russia have more number of Covid-19 cases than India now.

India’s number of infected people has increased to 297,538 and the death toll has risen to 8,498 on Friday, according to the Union health ministry.

India was among the 10 worst-hit countries on May 24 and the number of Covid-19 cases has been on the rise since then. It has been recording nearly 10,000 cases since June 2 and added nearly 90,000 or nearly one-third cases of its tally.

It has left behind Italy and Spain, two of the countries badly hit by the highly contagious Sars-Cov-2 virus, which causes Covid-19 and surfaced in China’s Wuhan late last year and became a global pandemic by March.

Two months before that on March 25, when the national lockdown was declared, the country had a little over 500 cases and 10 people had died.

India’s first Covid-19 case was detected more than four months ago on January 30 and it took more than 100 days to reach the one lakh-mark on May 18. However, the next one lakh cases were added in just about a fortnight.

Globally, more than 7.5 million people have contracted Covid-19 and over 420,000 have died.