A doctor enters an ICU ward of a COVID-19 isolation center in Mumbai, India, Wednesday, July 8, 2020. India has overtaken Russia to become the third worst-affected nation by the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)
NEW DELHI — India has reported nearly 25,000 new coronavirus infections and 487 new deaths.
The new infections announced by the Health Ministry on Thursday bring the nationwide total to 767,296, the third most reported by any country.
The surge in infections comes as the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai says its calculated transmission rate for the virus rose during the first week of July to 1.19 after steadily falling from a peak of 1.83 in March. A transmission rate is the number of new infections estimated to stem from a single case.
India’s infection numbers have skyrocketed since the government eased lockdown restrictions and testing has ramped up to more than 200,000 samples a day, compared to just a few hundred a day in March.
Health experts say the true extent of the virus’s spread in India is unknown and that the country must test more given its population of nearly 1.4 billion people.