India recorded 41,806 new coronavirus cases on Thursday morning, pushing the tally of infections since the outbreak of the pandemic in January last year to 3,09,87,880. The number was 7.7% higher than Wednesday’s count of 38,792 cases. India’s toll rose to 4,11,989 as it recorded 581 more deaths in the last day.
The number of active cases in India stood at 4,32,041, while the count of recoveries reached 3,01,43,850.
As of Thursday morning, 39,13,40,491 doses of Covid-19 vaccine had been administered in India. On Wednesday, the Union health ministry expressed concern about the slow pace of vaccination by private inoculation centres in some states. It advised the states to review the progress of vaccine procurement by private centres on a daily basis.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Home Affairs wrote to the states about the “blatant violation” of Covid-19 protocol in hill stations and markets, directing them to adopt measures to control large crowds. It said that an increase in R number, which measures how many people are being infected by one Covid-positive person, was worrying.
The Indian Sars-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium, or INSACOG, a consortium of 10 laboratories that conducts genome sequencing of Covid-19 samples, said that sub-lineages of the Delta variant of the coronavirus – AY.1 and AY.2 – were unlikely to be more transmissible than the strain itself.
Globally, the coronavirus disease has infected over 18.83 crore people and killed over 40.57 lakh since the pandemic broke out in December 2019, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Indonesia is recording a huge increase in Covid-19 cases because of an outbreak of the Delta variant. The country reported over 54,000 cases on Wednesday, according to Reuters.
“We’re already in our worst-case scenario,” senior minister Luhut Pandjaitan told the news agency. “If we’re talking about 60,000 [cases a day] or slightly more than that, we’re okay. We are hoping not for 100,000, but even if we get there, we are preparing for that.”
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