COVID-19 update: India overtakes Brazil as 2nd worst-hit country

India overtook Brazil as the second worst-hit country by the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic after the United States. It registered 168,192 cases in the last 24 hours as on April 12, 2021 and 904 deaths — the highest since the pandemic began.

• A total of 13,525,389 cases have been registered since the beginning of the pandemic, out of which 1,195,967 are active cases. As many as 170,210 people have died, according to private aggregator covid19.org.
• Maharashtra remained the worst-affected state with 63,294 new cases and 349 deaths in the last 24 hours. The state government is likely to take a call on announcing a complete lockdown in the state this week.
• National capital Delhi witnessed the highest single-day spike with, recording 10,774 new COVID-19 cases and 48 deaths. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said the fourth wave in the capital was “much more dangerous”.
• At a review meeting April 12, he said the government will take several steps to increase the number of beds in both private and government hospitals in the city. He added that a few government and private hospitals will again be converted into fully COVID-19 facilities, government officials said.

• He urged people having mild COVID-19 symptoms to get treated at home and to leave hospital beds and ventialtors for those in dire need of them. 
• State health minister Satyendar Jain said the government has appealed to the Centre to add 4,000 COVID-19 beds to its hospitals. He added that the central government hospitals as of now have 1,090 such beds.  
• Maharashtra, the most-affected state, postponed board examinations for Class X and XII.
• Assam and Odisha have made a negative RT-PCR test report mandatory for those coming from other states. 
• India may get a third vaccine for the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 soon. The Subject Expert Committee (SEC) will meet April 12 to take application of Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, for emergency use authorisation in India, news agency ANI reported.
• More than 781 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered across 154 countries, according to data collected by Bloomberg. The latest rate was roughly 17.9 million doses a day.
• The Union health ministry said the country was the first to administer 100 million doses of vaccine in the shortest time; It achieved the feat in 85 days, whereas the US took 89 days and China 102 days. 
• India has so far administered 10,45,28,565 doses. As many as 29,33,418 doses were administered in the last 24 hours.