West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee announced an extension of the biweekly lockdown till August 31 as cases increase
Coronavirus India News Live Updates: India’s coronavirus cases are inching towards the 15 lakh-mark, with 47,704 fresh cases and 654 deaths reported in the last 24 hours. Trailing only the US and Brazil, the country has so far recorded 14,83,157 cases including 33,425 deaths and 9,52,744 recoveries.
On Tuesday, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee announced an extension of the biweekly lockdown till August 31 as cases increase, while Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram, reeling under a ‘triple lockdown’ for the past three weeks has been flagged as reporting an extensive spread of the infection, higher than the state average.
Meanwhile, Uttar Pradesh became the first state to test more than one lakh samples a day. In the process, it also overtook Maharashtra, the worst-affected state, in terms of the total number of samples tested so far. However, Tamil Nadu still leads the testing figures by a comfortable margin, having tested more than 24.14 lakh samples till now.
For the country as a whole, the testing numbers have increased to more than five lakh every day. At the start of the epidemic, barely a few hundred tests could be carried out every day, because very few laboratories were accredited to do so, and there was a shortage of testing kits as well
Globally, over 16 million people have been infected with the virus and 6,55,300 have died, with the most number of cases and fatalities being reported from the United States.
Health workers at a health camp in Mumbai