India crosses 10-lakh coronavirus cases, toll reaches 25,600

India's COVID-19 tally on Friday crossed the 10 lakh-mark after 34,956 new cases were reported in the last 24 hours, said the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

With a million cases, India is now just behind US (3.7 million) and Brazil (two million).

As per numbers from the Health Ministry, there are 3,42,473 active cases in the country while 6,35,756 patients have been cured or discharged. One patient has been migrated.

As many as 687 new deaths were reported in the last 24 hours in the country due to COVID-19, taking the number of patients succumbing to the virus to 25,602.

It took 137 days for India to reach a million positive cases. The cases increased drastically after the Centre announced relaxations to the nationwide lockdown. In the last one week, India saw an average of 30,076 cases a day. For the sake of comparison, the average was 23,895 in the previous week.

Experts claim that the next one million cases may take less than one month with the current rate of new cases. The doubling rate presently stands at 20.6 days.

As per the Health Ministry, Maharashtra continues to be the most impacted state from the infection with 2,84,281 cases and 11,194 fatalities due to the virus. Tamil Nadu in second place has a total of 1,56,369 cases and 2,236 fatalities.

The national capital's COVID-19 cases have reached 1,18,645 with 17,407 active cases and 3,545 deaths.

The total number of samples tested on July 16 is 3,33,228 taking the total number of samples tested so far to 1,30,72,718, said the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).