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NEW DELHI: India has become the third country in the world to surpass four million coronavirus infections, setting a new daily record for cases on Saturday as the crisis shows no signs of peaking.
The 86,432 new cases led India to 4,023,179 infections, third behind the US, which has more than 6.3 million and only behind Brazil with 4.1 million.
While the government has eased restrictions in a bid to revive the economy, India now has the fastest growing number of cases in the world at more than 80,000 per day and the highest daily death toll at more than 1,000.
The number of cases in the country has gone 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.
Shamika Ravi, an economics professor and former government adviser who has closely followed the trends of the pandemic in India, said India is “nowhere near” a peak and Maharashtra should become the “focus” of the coronavirus campaign. .
“You cannot control Covid-19 in India without controlling the outbreak in Maharashtra,” he said on Twitter.
“Given its economic importance, Maharashtra will continue to influence the spread of the infection in other parts of the country.”
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