MUMBAI (Reuters) – India’s biggest cities on Saturday targeted tighter closures and other COVID-19 curbs as infections reached a six-month high as a one-month boom hit the country the third worst. by the pandemic.
India’s richest state, Maharashtra, was responsible for more than half of the 89,129 new cases reported by the national health ministry in the past 24 hours, with a record of 47,827 infections.
The state prime minister has warned citizens of an exclusion if matters increase at the current rate, saying medical infrastructure will be inadequate in a few weeks.
In the southern state of Karnataka, home to India’s technology capital Bengaluru, authorities have ordered the closure of gyms, bans of religious venues and the cessation of cinemas, bars, pubs and restaurants.
The capital of India, New Delhi, has recorded more than 3,500 cases, the highest year this year, but its prime minister has ruled out a closure for the time being.
Daily cases of coronavirus increased from about 15,000 in early March to about 88,000 in early April.
The South Asian nation recorded 89,129 new infections and 714 deaths, the ministry said. It was the largest daily rise since Sept. 20 and the most deaths since Oct. 21, according to a Reuters report.
India only follows the United States and Brazil in infections, with more than 12 million since the onset of the outbreak.
The government has intensified its vaccination campaign in recent weeks, but the shots were slow to reach India’s 1.3 billion people.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticized for exporting vaccines produced in India, when most Indians have yet to get them.
(Global vaccination tracker: here)
(Interactive graphic tracking worldwide spread of coronavirus: here)
Reporting by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Edited by Clarence Fernandez and William Mallard