Sunday saw a record addition in the number of new COVID-19 patients in India, with the ‘hot four’ states contributing nearly 80% of the total cases during the day.
A total of 4,296 new cases were reported in India by various states on Sunday.
With this the total number of cases has risen to 67,161. The previous single-day record was around 3,800 cases.
On Sunday, the highest number of new cases (1943) was reported in Maharashtra. Out of these, 665 may have been from earlier days (added to square off the numbers).
With 53 people losing their lives on Sunday, the highest number of new deaths too were reported in Maharashtra.
Gujarat had a mixed day. While the state did report 398 new cases, it also reported a whopping 454 recoveries and 21 deaths. Because of this, the total number of active cases in Gujarat actually fell by 77 on Sunday, allowing the state to slip to No. 3 position.
Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu replaced Gujarat as the state with the second highest number of active COVID-19 cases.
The state, which added 669 new cases on Sunday, has 5,198 active cases, 41 more than Gujarat.
However, in terms of death rate, Gujarat — along with West Bengal, Maharashtra and Punjab — are far ahead of states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala (see chart on top).
Despite reporting the third highest number of COVID-19 cases so far in India, Tamil Nadu has so far aseen only 47 deaths, which gives it a resolved death rate of 2.34%.
In comparison, the number of COVID-19 deaths in Gujarat is 493, or a whopping 16.23% of all resolved cases so far.
On a pan-India level, the death rate is 9.54%.
The highest proportion of deaths-to-recoveries is, however, in West Bengal, a state that has seen a total of 185 deaths.
Here, 30.73% of all resolved cases have resulted in deaths.
The percentage of deaths among resolved cases is supposed to be a good indicator of a state’s monitoring and health system.
States that manage to find all the cases at an early stage and give proper care to the patients tend to have low death rates, while the states with poor monitoring and public health infrastructure tend to have high death rates.
Kerala, despite having 492 resolved cases, has so far seen only 3 of its citizens die from this disease, while Karnataka, which has only 453 resolved cases, has already seen 31 deaths.
Maharashtra, the COVID-19 capital of India, too has a high fatality rate similar to Gujarat, at 16.54%.
In terms of total deaths so far, Maharashtra is at No.1 with 832, followed by Gujarat at 493 and Madhya Pradesh at 215.
West Bengal is at No.4 with 185.