Around 25,000 new coronavirus cases have been detected in India on Thursday and its transmission rate is increasing for the first time since March.
India’s health ministry said the COVID-19 death toll has risen to 21,129.
The new cases bring the total in the world’s third worst-affected country to 767,296.
India’s virus reproduction rate ticked up in the first week of July to 1.19 after steadily falling from peak transmission of 1.83 in March, shows a research by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai .
India’s infection numbers have skyrocketed since lockdown restrictions were eased.
At the same time, testing has ramped up to more than 200,000 samples a day, compared to just a few hundred in March.
Health experts say the true extent of the virus’s spread in India is unknown and more testing must be done, given its population of nearly 1.4 billion people.
