Half of the COVID-19 death burden in India as of Sunday was reported in three states, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, according to the Union Health Ministry. 971 deaths were reported nationwide on Sunday, of which 30.48 percent were reported in Maharashtra alone.
So far, 64,469 people have died from the viral infection nationwide. India’s case fatality rate (CFR), the proportion of deaths among those who test positive for the infection, is 1.78 percent, much lower than the world average of 3.34 percent.
The highest CFR has been recorded in countries such as the United Kingdom, where 12.4 percent of those diagnosed with the infection have died, and Mexico, where 10.7 percent have died.
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In India, the three states also account for the largest number of new cases. Of the 78,512 new cases registered on Sunday, 21 percent came from Maharashtra, followed by 13.5 percent from Andhra Pradesh and 11.27 percent from Karnataka.
Nearly 70 percent of all new cases were reported in just seven states, and other states reported the rest. Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh each accounted for 8.27 percent of cases, West Bengal was at 3.85 percent, while Odisha reported 3.84 percent of total new Covid-19 cases in the country.
The health ministry has asked the states that have been reporting the highest number of cases and deaths to take aggressive action and ensure higher tests, effective life-saving clinical management, and efficient multi-level monitoring.
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To effectively control the spread of Covid-19, the government has focused on increasing testing capacity to more than one million per day. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the target in late July, India passed the mark twice: on August 21 with 1.02 million tests and on August 30 with 1.05 million tests.
In the past 24 hours, however, only 846,278 tests were conducted, bringing the total number of tests conducted so far in the country to more than 42 million as of midnight Sunday.
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