Coronavirus Outbreak: With 8,909 cases in a day, India's COVID-19 tally tops 2 lakh-mark; death toll crosses 5,800

The total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection in India crossed the 2.07 lakh-mark by Tuesday, while the death toll has reached the 5,800-mark as well. It is to be noted that India has now become the world's seventh worst-hit country in terms of coronavirus cases, according to the World Health Organisation's (WHO) COVID-19 tracker.

At 9:30 AM on this day, the COVID-19 tally in the country has reached 2,07,615 cases, which includes 1,01,497 active cases; 1,00,303 cured, discharged, or migrated patients, and 5,815 deaths.

According to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, as many as 8,909 new COVID-19 cases and 217 deaths were reported in the country in the last 24 hours, marking a significant spike. In fact, this is the highest spike in the tally till now.

Notably, the country has witnessed significant and consecutive highest jumps in the country's COVID-19 tally for the major part of these past few weeks.

Maharashtra continues to be the epicenter of the coronavirus spread where the number of cases has witnessed an even large spike recently. According to the Health Ministry, Maharashtra has the highest number of cases with 72,300 positive cases of COVID-19 infection and 2,465 deaths. As many as 2,287 COVID-19 cases were reported from the state in the past 24 hours.

Notably, Mumbai, the financial capital of the country, has become the hotbed of the coronavirus spread in the state where the number of cases has crossed the 42,000-mark and the death toll has topped the 1,300-mark as well. At 9:30 AM on this day, the COVID-19 tally in Mumbai showed 42,216 cases and 1,368 deaths.

One of the real challenges in Mumbai is controlling the disease contamination in Asia's biggest slum -- Dharavi, which is an extremely densely-populated region.

Maharashtra is followed by Tamil Nadu with 24,586 cases, which overtook Delhi due to a recent massive spike in the number of cases. The national capital is third on the list with 22,132 cases.

After Delhi comes Gujarat, where the COVID-19 figure stands at 17,632 with 11,894 patients recovered and 1,092 fatalities. Rajasthan has reported 9,373 cases of which 6,435 have recovered and 203 patients are dead.

Madhya Pradesh has reported 8,420 positive cases so far of which 5,221 patients have recovered and 364 patients have lost their lives due to the virus. In Uttar Pradesh, as many as 8,729 people have confirmed COVID-19, of which 5,176 recovered and 229 people succumbed to it.

In Kerala, which reported the country's first COVID-19 case, 1413 people have been detected positive for coronavirus so far.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has said that a total of 41,03,233 samples have been tested until now, of which 1,37,158 samples were tested in the last 24 hours.

Earlier last week, the Centre announced plans to unlock the country and issued guidelines for the opening of various businesses with social distancing norms. India has been under lockdown since March 25, which was to end on April 14, but was later extended till May 3 then further till May 17 and May 31.

The current phase of re-opening, called 'Unlock 1', takes an economic focus. The government intends on being smart about implementing the lockdown in select places so that the economic activity of the country, as a whole, does not take any more hits. The rising number of coronavirus disease cases for the past few weeks in the country has led the Centre to take this call in order to prevent COVID-19 from spreading further.

According to the new guidelines, all activities outside of containment zones have been allowed to resume in a phased manner from June 1. The guidelines will come into effect from June 1 and will be effective till June 30.