New Delhi, January 10:
India has seen a rapid rise in its coronavirus disease (Covid-19) caseload in the past week, as established by the data released by the Union health ministry. The surge in cases is ben attributed to the Omicron variant, which has nearly three dozen mutations and spreads faster than the Delta variant.
In the week ending January 9, India recorded 6,38,872 cases of Covid-19. This is a sharp increase – of more than six times – from 1,02,330 cases recorded between December 27 and January 2.
According to the numbers released by the Union health ministry and listed on the dashboard of World Health Organization (WHO), India saw its daily tally of Covid-19 rise from 6,531 on December 27 to 27,553 on January 2.
The first day of the week that began after that (January 3), the cases went up to 33,750 and on January 9, the number had crossed 1.50 lakh-mark (1,59,632 to be exact). This was the second day in a row that India recorded more than one lakh cases of Covid-19.
The related fatalities have also gone up, though at a much slower pace, indicating that Omicron infection is spreading fast but is not as dangerous as the second wave. In the week ending January 2, India recorded 495 fresh deaths due to Covid-19, which went up to 761 in January 3-9 period.
The total fatalities in these two weeks were 2,020 (December 27-January 2) and 1,868 (from January 3-9). This is the sum total of all the adjustments done by various state governments.
India is at number 2 after the United States on WHO’s dashboard of countries affected the most by Covid-19. However, in terms of the number of new cases reported in the last week, India is at number 4.
The US reported the highest number of cases in the past week (4,027,033), followed by France (1,419,654) and the UK (1,267,948).
