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India has become the third country to pass four million coronavirus infections, setting a new daily record for cases, as the pandemic shows no sign of peaking.
The 86,432 new cases led India to 4,023,179 infections, third behind the United States, which has more than 6.3 million and only behind Brazil with 4.1 million.
The growing number of cases comes after the World Health Organization said yesterday that it did not expect widespread immunization against Covid-19 until mid-2021.
The WHO has insisted that it would never endorse a vaccine that has not been shown to be safe and effective, due to concerns about the rush to develop a vaccine against the virus.
As governments around the world implement measures to curb the virus, police in Australia, which have reported 26,200 cases and 748 deaths, arrested more than a dozen protesters in Melbourne for deliberately disobeying the city’s orders to stay in House.
The Indian government has eased restrictions in a bid to revive the economy, but faces the fastest growing number of cases in the world with more than 80,000 per day and the highest number of daily deaths with more than 1,000.
The number of cases in the country has soared from three to four million in just 13 days, faster than in the United States and Brazil.
The pandemic is now spreading through rural areas that have poor health facilities, but it is also making a resurgence in large cities like Delhi and Mumbai.
The state of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, has been at the center of the crisis in India since a nationwide lockdown was imposed in March. It still accounts for nearly a quarter of the new daily cases nationwide of 1.3 billion.
Read more: Latest coronavirus stories
Worldwide, Covid-19 has killed more than 870,000 people and infected more than 26 million, in addition to turning hundreds of millions of lives and wreaking havoc on the global economy.
Around the world, businesses and individuals are counting the cost of the pandemic as outbreaks continue to force governments to impose restrictions.
France yesterday posted its highest daily figure since last March, as Paris and other cities began requiring face masks in all public areas, including for children over the age of 11 who returned to school this week.
Even in areas where sidewalks have been eased, those who can work from home often prefer to continue to do so rather than return to the office.
In normally bustling central London, restaurants that were once full of customers are suffering.
The government of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is trying to encourage people to return to office, but that is easier said than done.
Oil giant BP has been actively encouraging non-frontline staff to work from home, and many of the employees at Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds banks also work remotely.
However, some sectors have seen big gains.
Suppliers of personal protective equipment have seen orders skyrocket.
Malaysian rubber glove maker Top Glove said it is receiving orders of 11 to 12 billion a month, compared to 4.5 billion before the pandemic.
The demand for such equipment does not appear to be going away anytime soon.
While the UN health agency welcomed the fact that a “substantial number” of candidate vaccines had entered the final stage of testing, which generally involves tens of thousands of people, it dampened expectations of a rapid miracle solution.
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said “in terms of realistic timelines, we really don’t expect to see widespread vaccination until the middle of next year.”
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