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 Wednesday crossed the 2.76 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 2,76,583 cases, which includes 1,33,632 active cases; 1,35,206 cured, discharged, or migrated patients, and 7,745 deaths.

According to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, as many as 9,985 new COVID-19 cases and 206 deaths were reported in the country in the last 24 hours, marking a significant spike. Yesterday, there was a spike of 9,987 cases in 24 hours, which is the highest spike till now.

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 90,787 positive cases of COVID-19 infection and 3,289 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 51,000-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 51,100 cases and 1,760 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 34,914 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 21,044 with 14,373 patients recovered and 1,313 fatalities. Rajasthan has reported 11,245 cases of which 8,328 have recovered and 255 patients are dead.

Uttar Pradesh has reported 11,335 positive cases so far of which 6,669 patients have recovered and 301 patients have lost their lives due to the virus. In Madhya Pradesh, as many as 9,849 people have confirmed COVID-19, of which 6,729 recovered and 420 people succumbed to it.

In Kerala, which reported the country's first COVID-19 case, 2097 people have been detected positive for coronavirus so far.

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.