Covid-19 continued its death march in Maharashtra, claiming 60 more lives on Saturday and infecting 2,608 more persons, the second-highest number of cases on a single day after 2,940 notched on Friday, health officials said.
This comes to roughly one death every 24 minutes, and a staggering average 108 new cases recorded every hour in the state for the day.
The western state has been recording fatalities above 50 and new patients over 2K daily for the past one week now.
With 60 fatalities down by 16 from highest 76 notched on May 19 the state death toll has touched 1,577 and the total coronavirus patients to 47,190 on Friday compared with 44,582 on Friday.
The Health Department said of the total cases, 32,201 were active, swelling by a new high of 3,747 over Friday's 28,454.
Of the total 60 new fatalities, 40 were recorded in Mumbai alone, taking the city deaths up from Friday's 909 to 949, while the number of positive patients here shot up by 1,566 cases to touch 28,817.
Besides Mumbai's 40 deaths, there were 14 in Pune, 2 in Solapur, and one each in Palghar, Thane, Satara and Nanded.
The dead included 41 men and 19 women, with nearly 60 per cent suffering from other serious ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, and asthma.
On the positive side, 821 cured patients returned home on Saturday, taking the total such numbers to 13,404.
Responding to the Chief Minister's call recently, over 21,750 people have applied to work as corona warriors, including 12,100 directly connected to the health sector as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab technic, ward boys, and paramedics etc.
The remaining 9,650 are from IT, teachers, security services, social workers etc. More than 3,700 of the total have expressed their readiness to serve in the Red Zones across the state, besides 3,750 who want to work in the huge Wuhan-type hospital set up in Mumbai, Uddhav Thackeray said.
The Mumbai Metropolitan Region
( With inputs from IANS )