A total of 15,25,631 tests have been conducted so far across 332 government and 121 private laboratories.
In his remarks in New Delhi at an all-party meeting held virtually, Modi said healthcare workers involved in treating COVID-19 patients, frontline workers, who include police personnel and municipal staff, and old people suffering from serious conditions would be inoculated on priority.
Gale-force winds, heavy rainfall and high tidal waves swept the coastal belt of Kerala, Karnataka and Goa as Cyclone Tauktae hurtled northwards towards Gujarat on Sunday, leaving four people dead in Karnataka and two in Goa, damaging hundreds of houses, uprooting electricity poles and trees and forcing evacuation.
How a swanky Mumbai cultural venue was transformed into a contact-less facility to combat coronavirus.
A senior Delhi government official when asked about the spiralling number of COVID-29 cases, and whether there could be another lockdown, however, said, cases have increased as testing has been ramped up, "so, it is not that cases are rising alarmingly, and hence there is no chance of going back to lockdown".
Agarwal said that the current 'R0' or R naught for the coronavirus infection is somewhere between 1.5 and 4.
This was the fourth consecutive day that COVID-19 cases in the country have increased by more than 26,000.
'Unfortunately, during this pandemic, everybody started saying that well, these are desperate times and desperate times need desperate solutions.' 'Purely out of fear, anxiety, panic, this knowledge that people started acquiring from WhatsApp University and social media, it pushed science completely to the backseat.'
In a stern two-page letter to West Bengal Chief Secretary Rajiva Sinha, Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla said stricter enforcement of lockdown norms was necessary to contain the spread of coronavirus in the state.
'Mucor is an environmental fungus, and it's much more prevalent in hot and humid areas.' 'The amount of fungus in the air is much higher in India than some other parts of the world.'
The joint secretary also said a high-level task force to work on frontiers of science related to vaccines and drug testing was formed on Sunday.
'Cases are increasing, day by day, because testing has increased.'
The death toll due to the coronavirus infection rose to 7,466 and the cases mounted to 2,66,598 in the country.
'The government had a vaccine from January.' 'The government should have given the vaccine to all population above the age of 45, right from the start.' 'Each state has its own problems, but as far as vaccine coverage in India is concerned, there have been mistakes.'
Social stigma and low testing are the key reasons for the high mortality rate among COVID-19 patients in West Bengal, where the disease, like elsewhere in the country, is still an urban phenomenon, experts say. The state's Trinamool Congress government has been drawing consistent criticism from the Centre and opposition parties over the way it has tackled the pandemic, and has been accused of under-reporting data about the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths.
The health ministry said that 86 per cent of the total active cases were recorded in 10 states of the country.
"We have received complaint from a state yesterday and so far discussed with three states. Too much variations have been reported in results of rapid test kits and RT-PCR kits. We advise states not to use them for the next two days," ICMR's Dr Raman R Gangakhedkar said.
The two western states, already battling a raging pandemic, which has put their health infrastructure under severe strain, opened new fronts to tackle the fallout of the storm which is expected to make a landfall close to Mumbai on Wednesday. They are likely to be impacted most by the cyclone.
This is the fifth consecutive day that coronavirus infections have increased by more than 15,000. There has been a surge of 3,38,324 infections from June 1 till date.
The top court also directed chief secretaries of the NCT, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Gujarat to take 'remedial action' ensuring proper management of patients at hospitals.
The global heath body had earlier suspended the hydroxychloroquine arm of the clinical trials of experimental COVID-19 drugs over safety concerns.
A 58-year-old man died after a power transformer fell on him in Raigad district. 2 people died and 3 were injured in two separate cyclone-related incidents in Pune.
'We started analysing young patients and realised that they had causes like undetected diabetes, which suddenly flares up during COVID-19.' 'Secondly, hypothyroidism was one of the factors.' 'And obesity.'
Taking exception to Health Minister Harsh Vardhan not mentioning the death of healthcare workers due to Covid-19 in his statement in Parliament, the Indian Medical Association has published a list of 382 doctors who died due to the viral disease and demanded that they be treated as "martyrs".
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