India Overtakes Brazil As Home To World’s Second-Worst COVID-19 Outbreak: Live Updates

Summary:

• India surpassed Brazil
• Delhi metro system reopens after 5 months
• UK official declares lockdowns must be avoided
• Australia sets timeline for vaccine
• Russia says more vaccine testing to begin this week
• Global cases top 27 million

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Following its latest global record for most new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in a single day on Sunday, India has overnight finally surpassed Brazil as the country with the second-largest outbreak in the world.

As expected, the record 90,802 new cases India reported on Sunday were enough to push its total past Brazil’s. India also reported 1,016 deaths, with Maharashtra, home to the financial capital, Mumbai, remaining India’s worst-affected state. It had nearly 25% of India’s total infections on Sunday as it reported 23,350 new cases.

As promised, Delhi’s metro rail system reopened on Monday morning, despite the city having a five-day rolling average of cases over 2,500. The rail, which is seen as vital to Delhi’s economy, had been shuttered for more than 5 months, and its reopening is part of the broader loosening of COVID-19-related restrictions as PM Narendra Modi shifts his focus to saving India’s battered economy, which has been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, contracting nearly 24% in the three months to June, its worst performance since records began in 1996. The metro in Lucknow, capital of India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, also reopened on Monday for the first time since India’s lockdown was initially imposed back in March.

India now as 4.2 million cases, compared with Brazil’s 4.12 million.

India’s death toll is just over 71,000, leaving it behind Brazil’s, which is just under 125k.

As new cases in Victoria decline while officials extend a lockdown, Australian officials announced that a vaccine would be delivered by January 2021.

After the UK reported nearly 3,000 new cases yesterday, its biggest daily tally since May., Environment Secretary George Eustice warned Monday that the country would seek to avoid another lockdown “at all costs” during an interview with Sky News, where he emphasized testing, tracing and localized lockdowns as the key tools in the kit.

As Australia extends a lockdown in Melbourne even as cases finally start to decline, the country announced Monday that it expects to receive batches of a potential COVID-19 vaccine by January 2021.

Over in Russia, which remains in 4th place worldwide for most cases, officials told the TASS newswire that testing on the next batch of subjects would begin this week as Russia seeks international approval of its vaccine. On Friday, the Lancet, a British medical journal, ruled that the Russian vaccine appeared to be “safe and effective.”

Globally speaking, COVID-19 cases topped 27 million on Monday in the US, with global deaths hitting 883,339, per JHU.