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 nearly 10,000 new cases reported in the last 24 hours, India's COVID-19 count on Tuesday hit a new high, crossing the 2.66 lakh-mark, while the death toll has crossed the 7,400-mark as well.

At 9:30 AM on this day, the COVID-19 tally in the country has reached 2,66,598 cases, which includes 1,29,917 active cases; 1,29,215 cured, discharged, or migrated patients, and 7,466 deaths.

According to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, as many as 9,987 new COVID-19 cases and 206 deaths were reported in the country in the last 24 hours, marking a significant spike. In fact, this is the highest spike in the tally till now. Yesterday, there was a spike of 9,983 cases in 24 hours, which was the highest until then.

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 88,529 positive cases of COVID-19 infection and 3,169 deaths.

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 50,000-mark and the death toll has topped the 1,700-mark as well. At 9:30 AM on this day, the COVID-19 tally in Mumbai showed 50,085 cases and 1,702 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 33,229 cases, which overtook Delhi due to a recent massive spike in the number of cases. The national capital is third on the list with 29,943 cases.

After Delhi comes Gujarat, where the COVID-19 figure stands at 20,574 with 13,964 patients recovered and 1,280 fatalities. Rajasthan has reported 10,876 cases of which 8,117 have recovered and 246 patients are dead.

Uttar Pradesh has reported 10,947 positive cases so far of which 6,344 patients have recovered and 283 patients have lost their lives due to the virus. In Madhya Pradesh, as many as 9,638 people have confirmed COVID-19, of which 6,536 recovered and 414 people succumbed to it.

In Kerala, which reported the country's first COVID-19 case, 2006 people have been detected positive for coronavirus so far.

According to the daily testing (molecular-based) update provided by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), a total of 47,74,434 samples have been tested until now, of which 1,08,048 samples were tested in the last 24 hours.

Shopping malls, religious places, hotels, and restaurants are now set to reopen in most states from today 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 plan to open these establishments under relaxed guidelines from today. But a lot of details were also left to the discretion of the states to finetune.