Coronavirus COVID-19: Maharashtra records two more deaths, state total reaches 12

The death toll in Maharashtra due to coronavirus COVID-19 jumped to 12 on Wednesday (April 1) after a 50-year-old man died in Palghar district and a woman died in Mumbai. It is learnt that the deceased has no history of foreign travel. Sources said that the woman who died in Mumbai had returned to India from Australia on March 25. 

The total number of coronavirus COVID-19 positive cases in India rose to 1,397 with a death toll of 35 till Tuesday evening. According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, India witnessed a spike of 146 new cases in the last 24 hours. Also three deaths were reported from Gujarat, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh. 

The government has identified a total of nine hotspots across India where higher transmission have been detected, according to sources on Tuesday. The hotspots identified are — Ladakh, Saheed Bhagat Singh Nagar (Punjab), Dilshad Garden (Delhi), Nizamuddin (Delhi), Bhilwara (Rajasthan), Pune (Maharashtra), Mumbai (Maharashtra), Kasaragod (Kerala) and Pathanamthitta (Kerala).

On Tuesday, the Union Health Ministry stressed that the Centre is implementing rigorous contact tracing and cluster containment strategies. He further said wherever even a single case of COVID-19 is reported it is as good as a hotspot for the government. "The number of hotspots in the country has increased. The government is using cluster containment strategies and doing rigorous contact tracing in these hotspots to check the virus from further spreading," Health Secretary Lav Agarwal said.

Meanwhile, the world wide number of positive cases touched 8,57,487 out of which the death toll stood at 42,107 till 6.25 am (IST) on Wednesday as per Johns Hopkins University data. The US has reported the most number of infections with 188,172 cases and Italy has the most number of fatalities with 12,428.