New Delhi, Sep 29 (UNI) India's daily spike of coronavirus cases witnessed a sharp dip after the country recorded 70,589 cases during the past 24 hours.
Even the deaths registered in the same period were way less than daily figures being reported as a total of 776 people lost their lives pushing the death toll to 96,318 till date.
Despite heaving a sigh of relief from the wrath of COVID-19, the economic figures are still alarming. According to the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), India’s economy is in "unprecedented crisis" because of COVID-19 and ambitious reforms across a wide spectrum like those in 1991 would be required to nudge it to a higher growth trajectory.
The NCAER, India’s oldest and the largest independent economic policy research institute, has said in its Quarterly Review of the Economy (QRE) that outlook for the rest of 2020-21 and 2021-22 remained ‘’highly uncertain’’ and for the year as a whole 2020-21 GDP would decline by (-) 12.6 percent.
The leading indicators for the second quarter suggest that while y-o-y growth was still negative, much would depend on how the spread of the disease played out, how Central and State governments respond to it and how workers and entrepreneurs respond to the disruption, the NCAER said.
Meanwhile, India's Recovery Rate leaped beyond 83 per cent on Tuesday with the recovered cases exceeding the new confirmed Covid-19 cases again during the past 24 hours.
Altogether 84,877 recoveries have been registered in the past 24 hours in the country while the number of new confirmed cases stood at 70,589. The total number of recoveries has touched 51,01,397.
According to government, the active caseload of the country at present is merely 15.42 per cent of the total positive cases and is consistently declining. India is currently home to 9,47,576 active cases.
Scenario
The top 10 states with highest cases are Maharashtra - 13,51,153, Andhra Pradesh - 6,81,161, Tamil Nadu - 5,86,397, Karnataka - 5,82,458, Uttar Pradesh - 3,90,875, Delhi - 2,73,098, West Bengal 2,50,580, Odisha - 2,12,609, Telangana - 1,89,283 and Kerala - 1,79,922.
India has a sizeable population of 1.3 billion people, which, according to experts, has been the prime reason of such huge cases.
The country has also been testing aggressively, with as many as 11,42,811 samples being tested in the past 24 hours.
Globally, the death toll due to the pandemic crossed the one million mark today. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it a "mind-numbing" figure and "an agonising milestone".
Since the pandemic began it has spread to nearly 188 countries with more than 32 million confirmed cases. In the absence of a readily available vaccine governments around the world have resorted to lockdowns and other measures of physical distancing to try to stop the spread of the virus, but that has thrown the world economy into a recession.
Vaccine
Serum Institute of India (SII) said that it would get a further USD 150 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the GAVI vaccines alliance to make an additional 100 million Covid-19 vaccine doses for India and other low- and middle-income countries next year.
"The funding will support at-risk manufacturing by SII for candidate vaccines from AstraZeneca and Novavax," the drugmaker said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Russia is mulling to share preliminary results of its COVID-19 vaccine trial based on the first six weeks of monitoring participants, raising the tempo in an already frenzied global race to end the pandemic.
Russia has already registered one vaccine. Developed by Gamaleya research center, it is now in post-registration trials. "Vector's vaccine is in the last stage of clinical trials, the documents have already been submitted for the expert review," Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko said adding that the medication will then be submitted for a pharmaceutical review, which may take "up to three weeks".
Negative or Positive ?
A multi-lakh scam and a much-disheartening fraud of issuance of COVID-19 negative certificates by a small-scale Arma lab in Kerala was busted recently. The lab faked the letter head of their parent Lab which is designated to issue COVID negative certificates.
Accordingly, Arma lab had collected as much as 2,500 samples in the past few months. But they did not send all the samples to Micro Lab for testing. Instead they had sent only about 500 samples for testing and issued fake COVI-19 negative certificates in about 2,000 cases.
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