India logged in over 4L cases last week in worst-ever spike
India has clocked in its highest number of cases in a week during the second week of August. The country reported more than 4 lakh cases and 6,518 deaths during this time. The number of recoveries stood at 3.81 lakh. The country crossed 2.5 million cases on the eve of Independence Day, according to the data by the Health Ministry of India.
India on an average reported 62,511 cases every day last week, making it the worst seven days of the pandemic. The previous week had an average of 52,000 daily cases. Almost one-third of the total 25.26 lakh cases in the country were reported during the last 15 days.
On August 13, India reported its highest number of new cases in a single day as it added 66,999 infections to the total tally.
The current recovery rate of the country stands at 71.61 per cent, but the daily number of recoveries have not managed to cross the daily number of fresh cases – a requisite for India to flatten the COVID curve.  During the last week, it reported 3.81 lakh recoveries, as opposed to 4.37 lakh fresh cases. The two had a difference of an average of 8,000 cases over one week. The same was 8,500 in the previous week.
Improving the death rate is one good sign even during the last one week. The current death rate for India stands at 1.94 per cent. The death rate is the number of deaths being reported per hundred positive cases.
The death rate for the last week stood at 1.71 per cent which is lower than the national figure. This is one positive sign on the fatality front. Monday (August 10) and Friday (August 14) were the days with the highest death count in this week with an addition of 1,007 new deaths.
The Test Positivity Rate (TPR) last week was much lower than the previous one. It stood at 8.45 per cent compared to the 10.26 per cent of the first week of August. The overall TPR for India stands at 8.84 per cent as of August 15.
The TPR is the number of positive cases per a hundred samples being tested. A low TPR suggests a decline in the spread of infection.
India has ramped up its testing over the last month. In the first week of August, around 40.28 lakh samples were tested while the second week saw 51.75 lakh samples reaching the testing laboratories. This means almost one third (or 32.22 per cent) of the tests were conducted in the first two weeks of August.
Maharashtra remained the worst-hit state as it crossed five lakh cases taking its tally to 5.72 lakh cases by the end of the week. Tamil Nadu (3.26 lakh cases) maintained the second position in the table followed by Andhra Pradesh (2.73 lakh cases), Karnataka (2.11 lakh cases) and Delhi (1.50 lakh cases).
