Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
New Delhi
India reported 4,213 coronavirus cases in a span of 24 hours, the health ministry said—a development that makes it the highest single-day rise of infection that took the country’s COVID-19 tally to 67,152.
Health ministry officials said in their evening update that India reported 98 more deaths, taking the country’s death toll from COVID-19 to 2,201. The country also reported 1,559 recoveries in a day. Officials said 20,917 patients had been cured so far—putting India’s recovery rate at 35.1 per cent.
The rising rate of infections prompted authorities to urge people with symptoms to “come forward to report so that they don’t spread infection to others”.
“Aarogya Setu mobile app has contributed significantly in India’s fight against COVID-19,” Ajay Sawhney, chairman of the Empowered Group 9 who also addressed the press briefing, said.
The new record breaking rise in COVID cases comes just a week ahead of the expiry of Lockdown 3 deadline on May 17.
Worried over the sudden spike, the central government issued two video messages on Monday. The videos feature actor Amitabh Bachchan who asks people not to ignore three key symptoms of COVID-19—fever, cough, short breath—and not to stigmatise patients.
The ministry said the sudden spike in cases could be a result of gradual unravelling of a latent disease burden with people fearing to come out and report symptoms from fear of stigma.
The central government on Monday also said mild and moderate patients would not need RTPCR tests before being discharged provided their symptoms have been resolved.
“Only severe patients will need a negative RTPCR confirmation before discharge,” officials said.
Aarogya Setu
The central government also said 9.8 crore people have downloaded the Arogya Setu application so far, and allayed fears of data breach saying it was the most data secure app in the world—only data of COVID positive users was transferred to the server for alerting health systems to prevent development of given areas as potential hotspots, officials said.
The central government said the data remains safe in the users’ devices and in case the users are non COVID positive the data will automatically be deleted in a month and for positive users the data will be deleted 60 days after the person turns COVID negative.
Out of 9.8 crore users data from only 13,000 positive users has been transferred to the server so far, government representative Ajay Sahni, heading the empowered group on COVID data said.
Rising cases
In Maharashtra, the Covid-19 cases mounted to 22,171, followed by Gujarat that has 8,194 cases and Tamil Nadu reporting 7,204 cases so far.
The state of Maharashtra has also reported the highest number of deaths, at least 832, which is followed by Gujarat (493) and Madhya Pradesh (215).
At least 6,923 people in the national capital have been infected with the highly contagious Coronavirus.
States which have reported more than 3,000 cases are Rajasthan (3,814), Madhya Pradesh(3,614) and Uttar Pradesh (3,467).
Other major states and Union Territories that have reported more than 1,000 cases, are Andhra Pradesh (19,80), West Bengal (1,939), Punjab (1,823) and Telangana (1,196).
Among other major states and UTs that have reported a significant number of cases are, Bihar (696), Haryana (703), Jammu and Kashmir (861), Karnataka (848), Kerala (512), Odisha (377), Tripura (150) and Chandigarh (169).
States/UTs that have zero coronavirus cases are Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Manipur, Mizoram and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. All individuals have been cured in these states/UTs and no casualty reported from here so far.
