Covid-19 in India: Daily spike close to 1 lakh, highest deaths recorded

India today moved very close to the grim milestone of one lakh Covid-19 positive cases in a single-day.

The country recorded 95,735 new infections in the last 24 hours, reports our New Delhi correspondent, quoting health ministry data updated this morning

The highest number of deaths in a day was also recorded at 1,172 fatalities.

The latest addition of cases took the total number of infections to over 44.65 lakh. The previous recorded highest spike was on Tuesday when India registered 90,802 cases.

The previous highest single-day count of deaths was recorded a day earlier with 1,133 fatalities.

India has been reporting the highest number of daily coronavirus cases in the world for nearly a month, according to World Health Organisation data.

There have been 72,939 recoveries in the last 24 hours pushing the total recoveries to 34,71,783. There are more than 9.19 lakh active cases in India.

Maharashtra, the most affected state in the country recorded 23,577 cases in last 24 hours - the highest among the states. The state also registered the highest number of deaths with 380 fatalities.

Delhi on Wednesday saw a record surge with more than 4,000 cases of coronavirus - the highest within the state since the outbreak gripped the capital in March.

Meanwhile, India's federal drug regulator has issued a show-cause notice to Serum Institute of India (SII) for not informing it about pharma giant AstraZeneca pausing the clinical trials of the Oxford vaccine candidate for Covid-19 in other countries and also for not submitting casualty analysis of the "reported serious adverse events".

The notice was issued following reports that human trials of the vaccine candidate, being developed by the University of Oxford, have been put on hold after a UK participant had an adverse reaction to it.

On the other hand, SII, which has partnered with AstraZeneca for manufacturing the Oxford vaccine candidate, on Wednesday said it is continuing with the trials in India.

Commenting on the recent reports on AstraZeneca halting the trials in the UK, SII said in a statement, "We can't comment much on the UK trials, but they have been paused for further review and they hope to restart soon."

"As far as Indian trials are concerned, it is continuing and we have faced no issues at all," the tweet added.