India suffers world-record spike in coronavirus cases

India, (Daily Mail), 3 September 2020 - India announced a world-record 83,883 new coronavirus cases today with the outbreak poised to overtake Brazil as the second-largest in the world.   

The mountain of new cases is higher than India’s previous peak of 78,357, while the US suffered its worst day with 77,255 on July 16 and no other country has seen more than 70,000 in a day.   

A million new infections in the space of two weeks have brought India’s total to more than 3.8million but many states are easing lockdown restrictions to ease the economic pain despite the contagion.   

India’s death toll is also continuing to mount, with 1,043 new fatalities in the last 24 hours taking the total to more than 67,000.   

India became the third country in the world to reach a million virus cases on July 17, after the United States in April and Brazil in June.   

After that, India reached two million within three weeks, while the jump from two to three million took only 16 more days.   

New surges are also being recorded in the country’s vast hinterlands, threatening to overwhelm their poorly-equipped healthcare systems.   

Unemployment is soaring with millions of people jobless, and the economic crash is the worst for at least 24 years.