Coronavirus Outbreak: India's COVID-19 death toll reaches 9,195; spike of nearly 12,000 confirmed cases in 24 hours

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 over 11,000 new cases reported in the last 24 hours, India's COVID-19 count on Sunday crossed the 3.2 lakh-mark, while the death toll has crossed the 9,100-mark as well.

At 9:30 AM on this day, the COVID-19 tally in the country has reached 3,20,922 cases, which includes 1,49,348 active cases; 1,62,379 cured, discharged, or migrated patients, and 9,195 deaths.

According to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, as many as 11,929 new COVID-19 cases and 311 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. Yesterday, with a spike of 11,458 cases, it was the first time that the country's COVID-19 tally had seen a spike of more than 11,000 cases in 24 hours. It was the highest spike to date until that record was surpassed today. 

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 1,04,568 positive cases of COVID-19 infection and 3,830 deaths. As many as 3,427 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 56,000-mark and the death toll has topped the 2,100-mark as well. At 9:30 AM on this day, the COVID-19 tally in Mumbai showed 56,831 cases and 2,113 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 42,687 cases, which overtook Delhi due to a recent massive spike in the number of cases. The national capital is third on the list with 38,958 cases.

After Delhi comes Gujarat, where the COVID-19 figure stands at 23,079 cases with 15,891 patients recovered and 1,449 fatalities. Rajasthan has reported 12,532 cases of which 9,431 have recovered and 286 patients are dead.

Uttar Pradesh has reported 13,118 positive cases so far of which 7,875 patients have recovered and 385 patients have lost their lives due to the virus. In West Bengal, as many as 10,698 people have confirmed COVID-19, of which 4,542 recovered and 463 people succumbed to it.

In Kerala, which reported the country's first COVID-19 case, 2408 people have been detected positive for coronavirus so far.

In the month of June, the spread of infection has been extremely rapid. This can be gauged from the fact that there were 1,90,535 cases of coronavirus in the country on June 1 but 13 days later, the figure has already crossed three lakh. Which is to say that, broadly, there have been around 1.25 lakh new cases of infection within just 13 days. Not only that, in these past few days, the death toll has also risen sharply as more than 3,000 people have died from June 1 to June 13. Not only are the figures shocking but also bode uneasy news for the future. It shows that people are not seriously following social distancing norms and that the coronavirus infection rate has been skyrocketing.

If this continues on a similar track, experts estimate that the country's COVID-19 tally may even surpass 10 lakh by the end of June.

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.