India reported 85,362 cases in the last 24 hours ending 8 am on Saturday, taking the total number of Covid-19 infections in the country to 59,03,933.
Also, as many as 1,089 new fatalities pushed the death toll to 9,60,969. At present, India has 9,60,969 active cases, while 48,49,585 people have been treated and discharged, the data released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said.
Former Jharkhand chief minister Babulal Marandi said he has tested positive for Covid-19 and urged those who came in contact with him in recent days to get tested. Meanwhile, Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, who is battling a double infection of COVID-19 and dengue, has been administered convalescent plasma therapy and his condition is better now, an official from his office said.
As India’s coronavirus numbers continue to grow, some promising signals over the last few days offer a glimmer of hope, even if temporarily. Wednesday was the sixth consecutive day when the number of people recovering from the disease, as reported in government data, exceeded the detection of new infections. Never before has this happened for more than a day — and those occasions were more in the nature of anomalies in the reporting of data, rather than the representation of a trend. The result has been that the number of active cases has started to show a declining trend for the first time.
Apart from bringing some of the leading contenders of a coronavirus vaccine to India, the Serum Institute is developing its own vaccine as well. It is partnering with SpyBiotech, a spin-off of Oxford University, for this purpose. Their vaccine candidate has entered into combined phase-I/phase-II clinical trials, which are being done in Australia. The trials began in the first week of September.
Globally, over 32 million have been infected with as many as 981,808 fatalities so far. India continued to remain the second worst-hit country after the United States, but topped the global chart in terms of virus recoveries.
