INDIA: NUMBER OF COVID-19 CASES IN INDIA RISES BY 48,698 OVER PAST 24 HOURS

Sat 26 June 2021:

India has confirmed 48,698 new cases of the coronavirus over the past 24 hours, with the total number of those infected having reached 30,183,143, the country’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said on Saturday.

The death toll from the disease has reached 394,493 people, with 1,183 new fatalities being recorded over the past day.

More than 29.19 million people have recovered in India since the start of the outbreak.

A day earlier, the country confirmed 51,667 new coronavirus cases, with 1,329 fatalities.

India comes second in terms of the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, following the United States with more than 33.6 million patients.

The third wave of Covid infections in India is unlikely to be as severe as the second, AIIMS chief Dr Randeep Guleria told NDTV Saturday morning.

Amid concerns the third wave will be driven by the ‘delta plus’ variant – the potentially more transmissible version of the ‘delta’ variant that fueled the second wave – he said the government is “closely monitoring” the situation, but the ‘delta’ strain is of more immediate concern.

“We are very closely monitoring that (the ‘delta plus’ variant) (but) at the moment ‘delta plus’ is not the dominant variant in India… the ‘delta’ variant is. So we need to actively track it… do genome sequencing to see how this variant is behaving in our population and prepare accordingly,” he said.

Comments“We need to learn from the second wave and prepare accordingly to deal with a possible third.”

The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. To date, more than 180.35 million people have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, with over 3.9 million fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.

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