Covid-19: Daily death toll crosses 4,500 mark, 2.67 lakh new cases in 24 hours

NEW DELHI: In another grim milestone, India on Wednesday recorded its highest single-day death toll ever with more than 4,500 people succumbing to Covid-19 even as daily new cases continued to remain under the 3-lakh mark for the third day.
India recorded 4,529 Covid-19 deaths in a day pushing the national death toll to 2,83,248, as per the Union ministry of health and family welfare update as of 8:00 am.
The country has been recording more than 4,000 deaths every day over the past week with a single-day exception when on May 15 the number of deaths stood at 3,850.

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Meanwhile, with 2,67,334 new cases of Covid-19, the country's total caseload now stands at 2,54,96,330. The count of daily cases continues to stay below 3 lakh for the third consecutive day.


The declining trend of cases which is largely consistent after May 6 when cases touched 4,14,554 has reduced fresh cases by 1.47 lakh. Even after this massive reduction in the past 12 days, India’s daily tally of fresh cases is by far the world’s highest by a huge margin.
According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) as many as 32,03,01,177 samples were tested for Covid-19 till May 18 and of these, 20,08,296 samples were tested yesterday.

Comparable global data compiled by WHO states that against India’s above 2.6 lakh case count, Brazil — which at present is the world’s second-worst in daily cases — reported 40,941 fresh infections. The numbers were 17,984 for the USA, 16,350 for Argentina and 15,093 for Colombia. No other country reported over 15,000 daily cases.

The overall global Covid-19 caseload has topped 163.9 million, while the deaths have surged to more than 3.39 million, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The US continues to be the worst-hit country with the world's highest number of cases and deaths at 32,996,565 and 587,199, respectively. In terms of infections, India follows in second place with 25,228,996 cases.