Even as new coronavirus cases in India rise at a daily rate of almost 10,000 per day, Health Ministry figures released today showed that the country had more cured COVID-19 patients than active cases. While 1,35,205 patients were cured from coronavirus since the outbreak, the number of active coronavirus patients in India stood at 1,33,632 today. Overall recovery rate stood at about 49%.

India's coronavirus count surged past 2.76 lakh today, claiming over 7,500 lives. According to medical research body, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), over 50 lakh samples have been tested for far for coronavirus while 1.45 lakh samples were tested in the last 24 hours.
Maharashtra remained the worst affected state, reporting over 90,000 cases. The state added 2,259 COVID-19 cases in last 24 hours. On the brighter side, nearly 47% of COVID-19 patients in the state were recovered from the infection.

Punjab registered one of the highest recovery rates in India. Nearly 80% of coronavirus patients were recovered in the state. There was 497 active COVID-19 patients in Punjab while 2,167 were cured from the infection.

Timely detection of coronavirus cases and stringent lockdown measures were the two reasons behind this high number of recovered patients, the health ministry stated earlier. India imposed a nationwide lockdown in the last week of March to contain the coronavirus spread in the country.

The number of COVID-19 cases in India has been doubling every three weeks but the epidemic is not growing exponentially in the country and South Asia region, the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week.

Soumya Swaminathan, WHO's chief scientist, noting India has a population of 1.3 billion, said that the 200,000 reported cases, "look big but for a country of this size it's still modest".