India’s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic rose to 1007 on Wednesday after 73 fatalities were reported in the last 24 hours as the country stepped up to ease the restrictions under the lockdown that have already lasted more than a month.
The number of infected people jumped to 31,332, the Union health ministry data showed at 8am, with 1897 new cases of Covid-19. The rate of recovery rose to 24.55% after 827 people were sent home after being cured, the health ministry’s dashboard showed.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has indicated that the lockdown could continue beyond May 3 in parts of the country worst affected by the pandemic identified as hotspots.
Despite the national lockdown that has kept people mostly indoors amid strict restrictions, Maharashtra and Gujarat continued to report some of the biggest spikes in the country.
There were 11,196 cases of Covid-19 in Maharashtra, including 400 deaths and 1388 people who have been sent home from hospitals. In Gujarat, 4359 people have been infected by Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, out of which 181 have died.
The two states have a doubling rate for infections at 8.3 days and 8.8 days respectively. The overall doubling rate for the country is 10.8 days, down from 4 days at the beginning of the month.
Delhi has 87 more patients of Covid-19 at 4446 but the number of fatalities in the national capital is less than the western state at 54.
Delhi and 14 districts across the country account for more than 60% of all Covid-19 cases reported in India, according to data from the federal think tank NITI Aayog.
Delhi, which has 11 districts, accounts for 12.62% of all cases in the country as of Monday. Mumbai and Indore feature among the list of the 14 other districts.
As the number of cases jumped, the health ministry has cautioned against the usage of plasma therapy, increasingly being seen as a magic bullet to cure critically ill Covid-19 patients, as a regular line of treatment.
It said the therapy of transfusion of antibody-rich plasma, a component of blood, from recovered patients of Covid-19 into those who are critically ill with the disease, should only be done as a trial and with all requisite approvals.
Some of the recovered patients in India have already donated plasma.
“ICMR is doing a pan-India study to evaluate the efficacy of convalescent therapy in critically ill Covid-19 patients, and until they come out with specific guidelines on it, no one should use it as a treatment modality for Covid-19 patients as it could not only be harmful but is also illegal,” said Lav Agarwal, joint secretary in the health ministry.
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), earlier this month, had issued a detailed document on the study model using plasma therapy, which has shown promise in the treatment of Covid-19 patients.
Globally, there are 3,114,659 people who have been infected and 217,153 of them have died due to the respiratory illness.
The United States recorded its one-millionth case of new coronavirus, about one-third of the entire world’s caseload, and 58,351 deaths on Tuesday.
