India posts record daily Covid cases

India's second wave of coronavirus infections continued to swell as it reported a record 115,736 new cases on Wednesday, a 13-fold increase in just over two months and raising pressure on the government to expand its vaccination campaign, report agencies. On Tuesday, 12,384 new deaths and 644,889 new cases were recorded worldwide.
USA logged 64,778 new cases of the coronavirus Tuesday taking the tally to 30,847,167. Brazil recorded 62,855 new cases on Tuesday. Its total cases stood 13,100,580. Number of new cases declined in Pakistan to 3,953.
Indian federal government has asked states to decide on local curbs to control the spread of the virus, but has so far refused to impose any national lockdown after the last one in 2020 devastated its economy and left millions of people penniless.
The total number of cases since the first recorded infection in India just over a year ago now stands at 12.8 million, making it the third worst hit country after the United States and Brazil.
Deaths rose by 630 - the most in four days - to 166,177, according to data from the health ministry.
Ominously, the daily increase has topped 100,000 twice this week. The only other country to post such numbers has been the United States.
Daily infections in India have also passed the peak of the epidemic's first wave, seen in September. The country had reported a multi-month low of 8,635 cases in early February.
And as the second wave gathered momentum, authorities in many states including hardest hit Maharashtra have ordered new local restrictions to contain the virus, some of whose variants have become more infectious.
Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus has killed at least 3,005,913 people since the outbreak emerged in China in December 2019, according to a tally from official sources compiled by Reuters Wednesday.
At least 132.2 cases of coronavirus have been registered. The vast majority have recovered, though some have continued to experience symptoms weeks or even months later.
So far, at least 156 countries have begun vaccinating people for the coronavirus and have administered at least 692,846,000 doses of the vaccine, according to Reuters tally..
Europe overall has 978,685 deaths from 45,199,611 cases, Latin America and the Caribbean 805,865 deaths from 25,509,650 infections, and the United States and Canada 579,637 deaths from 31,861,808 cases.
Asia has reported 278,872 deaths from 18,724,429 cases, the Middle East 116,599 deaths from 6,755,503 cases, Africa 114,322 deaths from 4,292,665 cases, and Oceania 1,004 deaths from 39,038 cases.
Since the start of the pandemic, the number of tests conducted has greatly increased while testing and reporting techniques have improved, leading to a rise in reported cases.
However the number of diagnosed cases is only a part of the real total number of infections as a significant number of less serious or asymptomatic cases always remain undetected.
As a result of corrections by national authorities or late publication of data, the figures updated over the past 24 hours may not correspond exactly to the previous day's tallies.
Another report adds: Britain begins using Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday in Wales just as its rollout of other shots has fallen to its lowest level this year due to a supply crunch caused by manufacturing problems at AstraZeneca.
Britain has surged ahead of the rest of Europe in the race to vaccinate its population, with almost half of its citizens receiving a first dose, but supply issues from its main Oxford-AstraZeneca shot have slowed progress in recent days.
Britain distributed almost 96,000 shots on Sunday and just over 105,000 on Monday, the lowest figures since the government started publishing daily numbers in January.
British ministers had warned the rollout would slow in April due to AstraZeneca's manufacturing issues, including at a site in India.