Highest single-day spike pushes India's COVID-19 tally to 9.68 lakh

COVID-19 cases in India crossed the 30,000 mark in a single day for the first time pushing its tally to 9.68 lakh, according to the Union Health Ministry data released on Thursday (July 16).

A record single-day spike of 32,695 COVID-19 cases were registered this morning while the coronavirus case fatalities rose to 24,915 with 606 new deaths recorded in the past 24 hours.

The recovery rate stood at 63.25 per cent this morning with 6.1 lakh patients in the country having recovered so far.  There are 3,31,146 active cases of coronavirus infection presently in the country.

Of the 606 deaths reported in the last 24 hours, 233 are from Maharashtra, 86 from Karnataka, 68 from Tamil Nadu, 44 from Andhra Pradesh, 41 from Delhi, 29 from Uttar Pradesh and 20 from West Bengal.

With a population of about 130 crore in the country, around 1.27 crore samples have been tested so far. The highest number of samples – 3,26,826 – were tested on Wednesday, the government said.

India zoomed past Russia to become the third worst-hit nation by the deadly coronavirus after US and Brazil.