India’s coronavirus death toll has surpassed 200,000 on Wednesday, with more than 3,000 fatalities reported in just 24 hours.
World Health Organization has warned that a variant of COVID-19 contributing to a surge in cases in India is found in 17 countries.
A total of 201,187 people have now died, 3,293 of them in the past day, according to health ministry data, although experts suspect that the true toll is higher.
India has now reported 18 million infections, an increase of 360,000 in 24 hours, which is a new world record. This month alone the country has added almost six million new cases.
The rapid rises in cases have been blamed on new virus variant as well as mass political and religious events, which have overwhelmed hospitals with dire shortages of beds, drugs, and oxygen.
The worsening health crisis came as the World Health Organization warned on Tuesday that the new Covid-19 variant, identified as B.1.617, had been detected in over 1,200 sequences uploaded to the GISAID open-access database “from at least 17 countries”.
“Most sequences were uploaded from India, the United Kingdom, USA and Singapore,” the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Nigeria recorded 156 new cases reported from 11 states on Tuesday, Nigeria Centre for Disease Control has confirmed.
A breakdown shows that ”Lagos (50), Enugu (43), Adamawa (40), FCT (8), Ogun (5), Akwa Ibom (3), Plateau (3), Jigawa (1), Kaduna (1), Oyo (1) and Rivers (1).’’
NCDC tweeted, ”Till date, 164,912 cases have been confirmed, 155,012 cases have been discharged and 2,063 deaths have been recorded in 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory
”A multi-sectoral national Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), activated at Level 2, continues to coordinate the national response activities.’’
