India sets record for daily coronavirus cases
India reported a worldwide record for daily coronavirus cases on Sunday (August 30) as the total number of infections across the globe passed 25 million, according to a Reuters tally.
India's single day tally of 78,761 new cases surpassed the previous record, 77,299, set by the United States in mid-July - a sign of how the epicenter of the pandemic has shifted, with the southern Asian country taking center stage over the US and Latin America.
But despite the surging numbers, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been pushing for a return to normality to ease the economic pain of a lockdown imposed in March.
On Saturday (August 29), his government announced that it will reopen underground train networks and allow sports and religious events in a limited capacity from next month.
Dr Rajiv Parekh, chairman of peripheral vascular and endovascular sciences at the Medanta Hospital in New Delhi, said once numbers had started going down - people thought they had "won the war".
"Everybody was you know, out there without wearing a mask, without any social distancing, without sanitizer. Basically, just gay abandoned. Everybody thought that everything is over and we are back to square one. That is something that we should not have allowed to have happened."
Globally, the rate of daily new cases has slowed to around 1.2% over August compared with 1.7% in July and 7.7% back in March.
However, health experts stress that official data almost certainly under-reports both infections and deaths, particularly in countries with limited testing capacity.
While COVID-19's trajectory still falls far short of the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected an estimated 500 million people and killed at least 10% of patients, some experts worry the available data is underplaying the true impact of the pandemic.
