India surpasses US global record for daily COVID-19 deaths
By Sheikh Saaliq and Biswajeet Banerjee
Published
Ambulances wait in line outside crematorium in South India amid COVID-19 surge
A long line of ambulances waited outside a crematorium in Bengaluru, India, on April 29, as COVID deaths in the country mounted. Credit - Zameer Baig via Storyful
NEW DELHI (AP) - India on Wednesday reported more coronavirus deaths in a single day than any other country at any time during the pandemic, while infections continued to spread through vast rural areas with weak health systems.
The Health Ministry reported a record 4,529 deaths in the past 24 hours, driving India s confirmed fatalities to 283,248. It also reported 267,334 new infections, as daily cases remained below 300,000 for the third consecutive day. The numbers are almost certainly undercounts.
The situation is particularly alarming in Uttar Pradesh, India s most-populous state with 200 million people, where a court Monday said citizens have been left “at God’s mercy. Even though new cases have been declining over the past week, the state has more than 136,000 confirmed active infections.
Government officials are racing to limit the spread of the virus in the state s villages. Teams have reached nearly 90,000 villages and the virus has been detected in about 21,000 of them, the Press Trust of India news agency cited senior health official Amit Mohan Prasad as saying.
Health experts say the true extent of the virus is hard to gauge, in part because of weak data, and that the government response has come too late.
The Health Ministry reported 4,529 COVID-19 deaths in the past 24 hours in India, which surpasses the global record that was set on Jan. 12 in the United States