The coronavirus pandemic in India saw a record number of cases confirmed in a single day, with infections crossing the 30,000 mark and deaths surpassing 1,000.
Tuesday saw 1,840 new infections with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), popularly known simply as the coronavirus. This marked the single-highest number of new infections recorded in a single day.
SARS-CoV-2 causes the disease COVID-19, cases of which now number at 31,787 in India at the time of writing. This followed the 1,840 new SARS-CoV-2 infections recorded on Tuesday, which also saw 69 confirmed deaths. This takes the number of confirmed fatalities due to the coronavirus pandemic in India to 1,008.
Globally, the case count stands at well in excess of three million. Confirmed coronavirus infections stand at 3,166,257 at the time of writing. 219,586 people worldwide have lost their lives.
Fortunately, 976,098 people have recovered from coronavirus. However, the active cases far outweigh the number of recoveries with active infections nearing two million. At the time of writing, there are 1,970,573 currently infected patients of whom 1,909,991 (97 percent) are in mild condition. The remaining three percent of active cases denote 60,582 people who are in serious or critical condition.
India remains under a national lockdown, which is due to end on May 3rd. However, there are talks of a lockdown extension following a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Ministers earlier this week. Some lockdown restrictions have been lifted already, however, with some small stores permitted to reopen and labour in areas such as agriculture permitted to resume in select areas of the country. Yet, going forward, areas of the country deemed to be hotspots (called ‘red zones’) of the coronavirus are likely to remain under lockdown. A gradual relaxation of restrictions in other areas of the country may be on the cards.
“We saw a two-stage lockdown, with strict measures in the first phase and then some relaxations in the second,” Modi explained. “Good work has been done in the states.” Going forward, he said that “efforts of states should now be directed towards converting the red zones into orange and thereafter to green zones.”
