Over 70% deaths due to old diseases

New Delhi: India's COVID-19 death toll rose to 4706 on Friday, with 175 more succumbing to the disease in the last one day, while the Health Ministry said more than 70% of these deaths were due to co-morbidities like hypertension, diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases, cancer, and immune deficiency conditions.

In contrast, as many as 71,106 persons affected with the virus have been cured so far, raising the recovery rate to 42.88% from the previous day's 42.75%. A total of 3404 persons have recovered in the past 24 hours while 7,466 fresh cases of COVID-19 were registered, taking the total number of cases to 1,65,799. This is the highest spike in fresh cases since the outbreak of the dreaded disease in India in March. Those under treatment also rose to 89,987.

Meanwhile, 1,21,702 samples of Corona virus were tested across the country in the last 24 hours. With this, the total number of tests carried out reached 34,83,838, says the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). It added that it is continuously scaling up its testing facilities for COVID-19 by giving approval to government and private laboratories.

As of now, total 641 laboratories across India have been given approval to conduct the test for COVID-19 including 446 government laboratories and 195 private laboratories' chains.

Maharashtra continues to top in all respects -- 59,546 tested positive, 1982 dead and 18,616 recovered.