India becomes the 5th worst-hit nation by COVID-19 with 9,971 cases in the last 24 hours

India's single day spike in COVID-19 cases inched towards 10,000 on Sunday, a Health Ministry data revealed. At least 287 people died in the last 24 hours due to the disease. A total of 9,971 new COVID-19 cases in a single day have been reported, taking the total number of confirmed cases to 2,46,628. And with this India surpassed Spain to become the fifth worst pandemic hit country globally.

Of the total cases, at least 1,20,406 are active 1,19,293 persons have been cured and discharged while 6,929 fatalities have been recorded so far.

At least 5,220 individuals had been cured since Saturday and India's recovery rate stood at 48.36 per cent, while the fatality rate docked at 2.80 per cent.

Maharashtra case count crossed the 80,000 mark and stood at 82,968, which is 36.64 caseload of the national tally. This was followed by Delhi with 27,654, Tamil Nadu with 30,152 and Gujarat (19,592). In the National Capital, a controversy erupted when the Delhi government lodged an FIR against the private COVID facility of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital for not using the RT-PCR app for sample collection.

Meanwhile, the total number of global coronavirus has surged to over 6.8 million, while the death toll was nearing 400,000, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

As of Sunday morning, the overall number of cases stood at 6,855,858, while the death toll increased to 398,321, the University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) revealed in its latest update.

India is now fifth worst pandemic hit country globally, after surpassing Spain's total number of COVID-19 cases and is now moving closer to the UK (2,86,294). The other countries are US (1,919,430), Brazil (645,771), Russia (458,102), the UK (286,294), Spain (241,310), Italy (234,801), Peru (191,758), France (190,759), Germany (185,450), Iran (169,156), Turkey (169,218), Chile (127,745) and Mexico (110,026), the CSSE figures showed.