India churning out highest daily COVID cases in the world

India has been reporting the highest number of daily coronavirus cases in the world from the last three weeks, putting it ahead of the US and Brazil. India, the third worst-hit country on Thursday recorded over 75,000 cases breaching the highest ever daily tally by the US, and recorded the worst spike so far globally.

On August 7, the country had recorded more than 60,000 cases for the first time and the graph has been on the rise since then. On Thursday, the country added 75,760 fresh cases. The US witnessed a spike of over 43,000 cases in the last 24 hours, while Brazil logged over 47,000 fresh infections.

Exactly a month ago, the country had registered 49,931 fresh novel coronavirus cases and the total tally stood at 14.35 lakh. Not just the daily cases, but the overall cases have also taken a huge leap in a months' time.

India's journey to over 33 lakh cases precisely took six months and twenty-eight days since the emergence of the first case on January 30.

On July 17, the country had logged 10 lakh cases, which then doubled to 20 lakh in 20 days, on August 7 and added another 10 lakh on August 23. It has now added 3 lakh cases in four days.

As per latest figures released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the total caseload stood at 33,10,234 while the death toll rose to 60,472. The number of recoveries also increased to 25,23,771. Recoveries are 3.5 times the active case, which stand at 7,25,991.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Thursday said that the early identification through aggressive testing, comprehensive surveillance, and contact tracing, and focus on timely and efficient clinical treatment of patients has ensured speedy recoveries and has also kept the case fatality rate low in some states.

Many states and union territories in India have better recovery rate and fatality rate than the national average. The overall recovery rate of the country is 76.24 %, while the fatality rate is 1.82 % of novel coronavirus patients.

There are five states and one union territory -- Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Dadar and Nagar Haveli, Haryana, and Gujarat where the recovery rate is more than 80 per cent, while another four have recovery rate more than 70 %.

The recovery rate was 7.10 % on March 25 when the lockdown was imposed and slowly increased to 7.1 % during the first lockdown; 11.42% in second; 26.59 in third lockdown and now 41.61% in the last phase of the lockdown.

The recovery rate was 63.92 % on July 27, exactly a month ago.

The national capital was the first state to cross the 90 % recovery rate, this month. On Wednesday, however, a sudden-spike brought it down to 89.82 per cent. More than 1.48 lakh people out of the 1.65 lakh infected so far have been declared recovered.

The case fatality rate, which is the proportion of people who die from the disease among individuals diagnosed, is below one per cent in Assam, Kerala, Bihar, Odisha, Telangana, Tripura, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh.

Besides this, there is a steady decline in the positivity rate, the percentage of tests that return positive, despite an exponential increase in testing. It has come down to eight per cent from eleven per cent during the first week of August.

Another parameter called basic reproduction number or R value which is used to measure the rate at which the infection is spreading, has also decreased in a weeks' time. The value has come down to 1.04 from 1.05 in a week. It was 1.83 in April. The disease is considered to be under control when its value falls below one.