By NewsDesk  @infectiousdiseasenews

India’s Ministry of Health is now reporting more than 5 million COVID-19 cases as of September 16.

India
Image/CIA

The second most populous country is now reporting 5,020,359 confirmed cases and 82,066 deaths after a single-day jump of 90,123 cases over the last 24 hours.

Most of India’s deaths are concentrated in its large cities – Mumbai, New Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Pune. But smaller urban centres in Maharashtra state like Nagpur or Jalgaon have also reported more than 1,000 deaths.

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In fact, Maharashtra state has reported 1,097,856 cases alone, more than any country besides the US, Brazil and India as a whole.

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Dr Gagandeep Kang, an infectious diseases expert from Christian Medical College in Vellore in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, said the number of cases increasing in India was inevitable.

Kang said, “The goal was for India to do enough testing to bring down test positivity rate, or fraction of tests that test positive to less than 5 percent or even less than 1 percent.”