India overtakes Brazil with second-highest Covid-19 cases

India has recorded a global one-day record of more than 90,000 positive coronavirus cases, taking the country past Brazil as the second most infected country in the world, with 4.2m confirmed cases.

On Sunday India recorded 90,802 new cases and 1,016 deaths. The worst affected state continues to be Maharashtra, home to the financial capital, Mumbai. It has had nearly a quarter of the country’s total infections, and on Sunday it reported a record 23,350 new cases.

In the capital, Delhi, the city’s metro rail system reopened on Monday morning, despite the city having a five-day rolling average of cases over 2,500. The reopening comes more than five months after the service was closed because of Covid-19.

“We have deployed police force at every metro station for crowd management and to ensure that people wear face masks and follow norms of social distancing,” Atul Katiya, joint commissioner of police told the Indian news agency, ANI.

The metro in Lucknow, capital of India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, also reopened on Monday after a five-month closure.

Despite its high number of cases, the country’s death toll is just over 71,000, and according to the ministry of health, the case fatality rate was down to 1.72% on Sunday.
Brazil now sits in third place globally, with 4.13 million cases. The US has 6.27 million cases.

Daily case numbers are also rising in France, the UK and the US. In France, authorities have placed seven more departments covering major cities such as Lille, Strasbourg and Dijon on high alert. The move comes as the nation reported a record of nearly 9,000 daily cases on Friday, and a further 8,550 cases in the past 24 hours on Saturday, when the nationwide test positivity rate increased to 4.7%.

The UK saw nearly 3,000 cases confirmed on Sunday, the highest figure since May, while infections are rising in 22 US states, according to a Reuters analysis. The US trend is concerning on a Labor Day holiday weekend, traditionally filled with family gatherings and parties to mark the end of summer.

South Korea has meanwhile added 119 more cases of the coronavirus, its lowest daily jump in more than three weeks amid a downward trend in new cases.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday the additional figures took the country’s total to 21,296 with 336 deaths.

Australia on Monday said it would receive the first batches of a potential Covid-19 vaccine in January 2021, as the country’s virus hotspot said the number of new daily infections has fallen to a 10-week low, Reuters reports.

Patients hospitalised with Covid-19 still have lung damage, breathlessness and coughs weeks after being discharged, researchers have found. Global coronavirus cases passed 27m, with 883,339 deaths confirmed, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.

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