Coronavirus Outbreak: With highest single-day spike of over 11,000 cases; India's COVID-19 tally crosses 3 lakh

The coronavirus cases in India continue to spread rapidly as the country has marked significant and consecutive highest jumps in the COVID-19 tally over a major part of the past two weeks. With nearly 10,000 new cases reported in the last 24 hours, India's COVID-19 count on Saturday crossed the three lakh-mark, while the death toll has crossed the 8,800-mark as well.

At 9:30 AM on this day, the COVID-19 tally in the country has reached 3,08,993 cases, which includes 1,45,779 active cases; 1,54,330 cured, discharged, or migrated patients, and 8,884 deaths.

According to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, as many as 11,458 new COVID-19 cases and 386 deaths were reported in the country in the last 24 hours, marking a significant spike. In fact, this is the highest single-day spike in India's COVID-19 tally till now.

Until now, India had continued to witness close to 10,000 cases every day. This is the first time that the country's COVID-19 tally has seen a spike of more than 11,000 cases in 24 hours.

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 1,01,141 positive cases of COVID-19 infection and 3,717 deaths. As many as 3,493 new 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 55,000-mark and the death toll has topped the 2,000-mark as well. At 9:30 AM on this day, the COVID-19 tally in Mumbai showed 55,451 cases and 2,044 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 40,698 cases, which overtook Delhi due to a recent massive spike in the number of cases. The national capital is third on the list with 36,824 cases.

After Delhi comes Gujarat, where the COVID-19 figure stands at 22,562 cases with 15,501 patients recovered and 1,416 fatalities. Rajasthan has reported 12,068 cases of which 9,011 have recovered and 272 patients are dead.

Uttar Pradesh has reported 12,616 positive cases so far of which 7,609 patients have recovered and 365 patients have lost their lives due to the virus. In Madhya Pradesh, as many as 10,443 people have confirmed COVID-19, of which 7,701 recovered and 440 people succumbed to it.

In Kerala, which reported the country's first COVID-19 case, 2323 people have been detected positive for coronavirus so far.

Shopping malls, religious places, hotels, and restaurants have now been reopened in most states from earlier this week after more than two months of sustained lockdown. 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 Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had also released the standard operating procedure (SOPs) for malls, restaurants, and hotels as they opened these establishments under relaxed guidelines. But a lot of details were also left to the discretion of the states to finetune.