India’s Covid-19 tally crossed the 24-lakh mark on Friday with 64,553 new cases in 24 hours, bringing the infection count to 24,61,190, according to the Union Health Ministry data.

The death toll climbed to 48,040 with 1,007 more fatalities, said the Health Ministry.

The daily cases count of India is reportedly the highest in world since the last 10 days, according to WHO data.

The recovery of COVID-19 patients have surged to 1,751,555 with a record 55,573 more people recuperating in the past 24 hours, taking the recovery rate to nearly 70.17 per cent.

Meanwhile, the active cases currently stands at 6,61,595.

Notably, the case fatality rate, which is the proportion of people who die from the disease among individuals diagnosed, has dropped to 1.96 per cent, the ministry said.

The country had touched the 20-lakh mark on August 7 and added more than four lakh cases in seven days. The silver lining, however, is that the gap between recoveries and active cases is growing every day. Currently, recoveries are over 10 lakh more than the active cases.

As many as 8,48,728 samples were tested on Thursday, taking the total to 2,76,94,416 samples being tested till date, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Maharashtra remained the worst-hit state with a total of 5,60,126 cases and 19,063 deaths; followed by Tamil Nadu with 3,20,355 cases and 5,397 deaths. Then comes Andhra Pradesh with 9,996  fresh cases in the state, taking the total infection count at 2,64,142. While, in Karnataka the positive cases of Coronavirus crossed the two lakh-mark, with  6,706 fresh cases of the infection pushing the total cases to 2,03,200.

On Thursday, the union government stated that it has distributed more than 3.04 crore N95 masks, more than 1.28 crore PPE kits to states, union territories and central institutions free of cost in the last five months. Over 22,000 ‘Make in India’ ventilators have also been delivered.

The Centre has been strengthening the health infrastructure to fight the pandemic and effectively manage it. Along with augmenting COVID-19 facilities, the government has been providing medical supplies free of cost to the state and union territories to supplement their efforts.

At the global front, India still remains the third worst-hit country in terms of cases. While, the United States is the worst hit country in the world with 5,248,172 cases of the deadly infection.  The fatalities in America are reported to be 167,092.

Meanwhile, Brazil has the second highest positive cases of COVID-19 in the world with 3,164,785 infections. The fatalities due to Coronavirus stands at 104,201 in the country.

Globally, as of Friday morning, the total number of cases stood at over 2.09 crore and the fatalities rose to 755,000, according to the Johns Hopkins University.