As the week closed, India was very close to Brazil, the second worst-affected country in the world, in terms of confirmed Covid-19 cases. As per official estimates, the number of confirmed cases in India are about 41.13 lakh as against 41.23 lakh cases reported in the south American country. The US is still at the top with 61.43 lakh cases. 

In the last 24 hours, India reported over 90,000 new cases, nearly 4,000 more than the previous day, However, with more than 73,640 people recovering and 1,065 persons dying, new addition to the current active cases was nearly 16,000. India currently has the total active cases of 8,62,320. 

Meanwhile, the Central government is a two-member expert team each to Punjab and Chandigarh to assist them to strengthen public health measures. The teams -- consisting of a community medicine expert and an epidemiologist -- will be stationed in the State and the Union Territory for 10 days, the official release said. 

While Punjab continues to report relatively high mortality rates (1808 deaths from 61,527 cases), Chandigarh has a high positivity rate of 11.99 per cent, even though there were only 5,500 cases reported so far. 

This was part of the Centre's efforts to active support States and UTs that are seeing a surge in Covid cases and that reporting higher mortality rates. The government eventually wants all States to bring down the moratlity rate below 1 per cent, the release said.

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