With a record single-day spike of 64,399 fresh cases, India’s COVID-19 tally crossed the 21 lakh mark on Sunday, said the Union Health Ministry. While the death toll climbed to 43,379 with 861 more fatalities.

The total Coronavirus count have reached 21,53,010, with the highest single day spike.

This is the third consecutive day that the COVID-19 cases have increased by more than 60,000 infections in 24 hours, according to the ministry’s data.

While India had crossed the 20 lakh mark on Friday, it took only 2 days to cross 21 lakh mark.

While 14,80,884 patients have recovered so far with record 53,879 more people recuperating in the past 24 hours, taking recovery rate to 68.78 per cent.

The case fatality rate has dropped 2.01 per cent, according to Health Ministry data.

“Focused and effective efforts towards containment, testing, isolation and treatment by the Centre, states and Union Territories have resulted in the recovery rate rising to 68.32 per cent and fatality rate steadily declining to 2.04 per cent, ” the Health Ministry said.

There are 6,28,747 active cases of the coronavirus disease, comprising 29.20 per cent of the total caseload in the country.

According to the Indian Council of Medical Research(ICMR) as many as 7,19,364 samples were tested on Saturday, the highest in a day so far. While ,a  total of 2,41,06,535 samples have been tested so far in the whole country.

“India is performing around 500 tests for detection of COVID-19 per minute and the per-day testing capacity has increased over five lakhs,” scientist and ICMR media coordinator Lokesh Sharma was quoted by news agency PTI as saying.

Meanwhile, five states reported the highest number of patients in the last 24 hours – Maharashtra( 490,262),  Tamil Nadu (279,144), Andhra Pradesh (206,000), Karnataka (158,254) and Delhi (142,723).

Maharashtra, the worst-affected state on Saturday passed 5 lakh-mark. The state has 1,47,355 active cases, the highest in the country. 17,367 people have died of the infection in the state so far.

Meanwhile, India is the third worst-hit country in terms of cases behind Brazil, which has more than 3,013,369 cases and the US with more than five million people now infected with  the virus.

At the global front, the total number of Coronavirus cases rose to 19.5 million with deaths reaching 724,000, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.