India now has the second-highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world, surpassing Brazil, after Indian health authorities reported 90,000 new infections late Sunday, taking the country's tally to 4.2 million cases with 71,000 mortalities.
India now only trails the United States, which has the biggest number of infections at 6.2 million, data from the Johns Hopkins University showed.
The second-most populous nations in the globe with 1.4 billion people, India has been registering the world's biggest spike on a daily basis in the last few weeks. Brazil, now in the third spot, had tallied more than 4 million infections and 126,686 fatalities as of late Sunday.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration, dealing with a crisis that is getting worse by the day, has opted to loosen most restrictions in an attempt to regenerate an economy that is crippled following weeks of rigid lockdowns.
Many health experts said the government is not conducting enough clinical trials to find out if people are sick and not properly recording the number of actual fatalities, which means the real figures could be much bigger.
Virologist Shahid Jameel, director of the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance, stated that the most important metric to watch is the rate of increase in coronavirus cases, which he describes as "alarming".
According to Randeep Guleria, chief of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the country is attributing the hike in infections to "behavioral exhaustion," India's Business Today reported. Many people, Guleria said, are now "getting tired" of wearing masks and observing safety measures.
In a grim projection by experts based on current data, India could even surpass the U.S. in terms of the number of COVID-19 infections by October as the virus is transmitted from the big cities of New Delhi and Mumbai to other areas.
More than 20 million people live in the capital city of Delhi, which registered 3,256 new cases on Sunday. On average, India has been conducting tests on over 10 million people a day, and authorities are planning to increase the total.
