Five states -- Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh -- have accounted for over half of the total COVID-19 cases and close to 60 per cent of the recoveries reported in the last 24 hours, the Union health ministry said on Tuesday.
Cumulatively, these five states reported 536 deaths in a day which is over 65 per cent of the total fatalities registered in the country during the period.
India reported 69,921 new instances of coronavirus infection in 24 hours taking the country's tally of cases to 36,91,166.
The death toll mounted to 65,288 with 819 more fatalities being reported during the same period, the official data updated on Tuesday 8 am showed.
Simultaneously, continuing the streak of posting over 60,000 recoveries daily for the past five days, India saw 65,081 people recuperating from coronavirus infection in 24 hours taking the total recoveries to 28,39,882. The recovery rate has risen to 76.94 per cent, it said.
In these 24 hours, Maharashtra reported 11,852 new coronavirus infections, Andhra Pradesh 10,004, Karnataka 6,495, Tamil Nadu 5,956 and Uttar Pradesh 4,782. Together, they account for 56 per cent of the cases added in a day, the official statistics revealed.
These five states have also reported the maximum number of patients that were cured and discharged in 24 hours, cumulatively accounting for 58.04 per cent of the total 65,081 people who have recovered during the period across the country.
While Maharashtra reported 11,158 recoveries in a day, the corresponding figures for Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka stand at 8,772 and 7,238 respectively. Tamil Nadu registered 6,008 recoveries, while in Uttar Pradesh the figure stood at 4,597.
Maharashtra has reported 184 new deaths, Karnataka 113, Tamil Nadu 91, Andhra Pradesh 85 and Uttar Pradesh 63. In total, these five states have registered 536 deaths which is 65.4 per cent of the 819 fatalities reported in a day nationwide.
While the recovery rate has risen close to 77 per cent, the case fatality rate has further dropped to 1.77 per cent. The number of recoveries is 3.61 times the active cases of the viral infection.
"India has more than 20.53 lakh recovered people than the active cases that stand at 7,85,996 on Tuesday," the ministry said and underlined that the number of recovered patients has grown four times between the first week of July and the last week of August.
According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, a cumulative 4,33,24,834 samples have been tested up to August 31, with 10,16,920 of them being tested on Monday.
