With 78,761 new COVID-19 cases and 948 deaths in the last 24 hours, India’s coronavirus tally has shot to 3,542,734 with 63,498 deaths. The country has 765,302 active cases as of now, Union Health Ministry said on Sunday morning.

The Indian Council of Medical Research said, that 41,461,636 samples were tested up to August 29 and of these 1,055,027 samples were tested on Saturday. A total of 2,713,934 patients have recovered from the infection on Saturday.

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“As India rides the wave of an upsurge in testing, many States have exceeded 140 tests/day/million population as advised by WHO and several have demonstrated better performance with Positivity Rate lower than the national average,” the Ministry of Health said on Sunday. 

As of Saturday, India had recorded 4,96,070 cases in seven days, the highest number recorded during a seven day period in the world. 

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India continues to be the third worst-affected nation after the United States and Brazil. While the US has reported over 6.01 million COVID-19 cases with over 184,000 deaths, Brazil has reported over 3.85 million COVID-19 cases and over 120,019 deaths.

The global COVID-19 cases zoomed past 24.8 million. More than 8.3 lakh people have died due to the infection so far.