India added 20,903 cases of the Covid-19, in the biggest 24-hour jump so far, which pushed the country’s tally to 625,544, according to the Union health ministry on Friday.
More than one lakh Covid-19 were recorded in a week between June 27 and July 3—from 508,953 to the current 625,544.
According to the health ministry’s dashboard at 8am, 379 people succumbed to the viral disease between Thursday and Friday morning taking the death toll to 18,213.
The number of people who have been cured of the coronavirus disease now stands at 379,891 after 20,032 patients were sent home in the past one day. This takes India’s recovery rate to 60.72%.
The health ministry dashboard showed there are 227,439 active cases on Friday morning.
The country’s caseload mostly comes from the states of Maharastra, which has 186,626 Covid-19 cases, Tamil Nadu with 98,392 infections, Delhi at 92,175 and Gujarat’s tally of 33,913.
Union home minister Amit Shah has advised the chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi, which are home to close to 30 million people, to ramp up efforts to contain the coronavirus epidemic in the National Capital Region (NCR).
Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi should coordinate their response to the Covid-19 outbreak by focussing on timely hospital access and using available tools for contact tracing.
Delhi, Gurugram, Noida and Ghaziabad together account for over 100,000 infections till now, with the Capital alone recording close to 90% of it, according to government data.
Delhi, however, also has close to 67% of the NCR population and the highest per capita testing in the country, which means it is likely to detect more of the outbreak.
Meanwhile, the home isolation guidelines for Covid-19 has been revised by the Union health ministry by adding asymptomatic patients as well as very mild and pre-symptomatic cases to the list of people eligible for home isolation.
However, immune-compromised positive cases, such as those on HIV/AIDS or cancer medication or who are transplant recipients, will not be allowed home isolation.
According to the revised guidelines, a person should be clinically assigned as a very mild, pre-symptomatic, or asymptomatic case by the treating medical officer, and such cases should have the requisite facility at their residence for self-isolation and also for quarantining the family contacts.
