India  recorded its highest-ever single-day death toll due to the deadly Covid-19 virus after official figures released by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Affairs stated that 4,205 people succumbed to the coronavirus in just the past 24 hours.

While the positivity rate is showing a declining trend, the fatalities are rising at an alarming rate due to the overwhelmed healthcare system that was not equipped to tackle a pandemic of this scale.

With the 4205 deaths in the last 24 hours, India’s death toll has also crossed the 2.5 lakh-mark and mounted to 2,54,197, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday.

India recorded its previous highest single-day death toll on May 8 when 4,187 had died due to the virus in the 24-hour period before that.

The country logged its highest single-day spike of 4,14,188 cases on May 7.

There were 3,48,421 new infections in the past one day, taking the country’s overall caseload to 2,33,40,938.

As many as 3,55,338 were discharged from hospitals and other medical facilities across the country yesterday, taking the overall hospital recovery count to 1,93,82,642.

There are currently 37,04,099 active cases in India, while 17,52,35,991 people have received their first or both doses of vaccines so far.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday said that the highly-powerful double mutant variant from India, which is responsible for the devastating second wave of the Covid-19 outbreak, has been found in as many as 44 countries so far.

The UN health agency informed that the B.1.617 variant of the Covid-19 virus, which was first detected in India in October 2020, was found in genome sequences uploaded to the GISAID open-access database “from 44 countries in all six WHO regions”, and that the WHO also received “reports of detections from five additional countries”.

The WHO had earlier this week declared ‘B.1.617’ as ‘variant of concern’.