India’s Covid-19 Tally Past 1.11 Mn, Recoveries Cross 7 Lakh

India’s tally of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) mounted to 1,118,043 after 40,425 new cases, in a record single-day spike, were reported in the last 24 hours, with more than 200,000 infections in a week, according to the Union Health Ministry on Monday.

The number of recovered people exceeds India’s active Covid-19 patients by 309,627 as more than seven lakh have been cured of the viral disease so far, the Health Ministry’s data showed at 8am.

Between Sunday and Monday morning, 22,664 people recovered, taking the recovery rate to 62.61%.

The country’s death toll rose to 27,497 with 681 fatalities reported in a day.

The Health Ministry said on Sunday that India’s fatality rate is lower than the global average with the case fatality rate (CFR) falling below 2.5% for the first time in five months. The global CFR or the ratio of confirmed deaths and confirmed Covid-19 cases was 3.41 as of July 18.

India had recorded the highest CFR of 3.23% in mid-May after the first death was reported on March 12.

Manipur, Nagaland, Sikkim, Mizoram and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have a zero case fatality rate and there are about 14 states that have a CFR of less than 1%, the Health Ministry said.

There are at least 29 states that have a CFR of below the national average, it said.

As the number of Covid-19 cases soared in the country, at least seven companies are racing to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus disease. Leading the race is Bharat Biotech International Limited (BBIL), which developed Covaxin.

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi will start enrolling healthy individuals from Monday for conducting the human clinical trial of the indigenously developed Covid-19 vaccine candidate.

This comes after AIIMS’ Ethics Committee gave its nod for a human clinical trial of Covaxin on Saturday.

“We are launching the enrollment process from Monday. We are going to select healthy participants with no co-morbidities and without a history of Covid-19,” Dr Sanjay Rai, a professor at AIIMS’ Centre for Community Medicine, said, according to news agency ANI.

AIIMS Delhi is among the 12 institutes selected by the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) for conducting phase I and II human trials of Covaxin. The vaccine would be tested on 375 volunteers during phase I and the maximum of 100 of them would be from AIIMS.

There are 14.45 people who have been infected by Sars-Cov-2, which causes the coronavirus disease, and 605,162 patients have died across the world so far, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.