In the past 24 hours, the total number of coronaviruses in India has exceeded the 25 million mark, adding 263,533 new infections, and the number of deaths from COVID-19 has risen by a record 4,329.

India became the second largest country in the world after the United States, surpassing this grim milestone. According to data from the Ministry of Health on Tuesday, the country’s current total number of cases is 25.23 million and the death toll is 278,719.

The official daily number of cases has fallen since last week. The number of new infections on Monday was 281,386. This is the first time since April 21 that it has fallen below 300,000.

Experts say that even if the infection rate has declined in the past few days, it is impossible to be sure that the infection rate has reached its peak, and that the vigilance of the new and more infectious B.1.617 variant is becoming higher and higher at home and abroad.

Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist of the World Health Organization, said in the “India”: “Many parts of the country have not yet experienced the peak period and are still rising.”

Swaminathan pointed out that the national positive rate is worryingly high, accounting for about 20% of the tests conducted, which suggests that the situation may be worse.

“In many states, testing is still insufficient. And when you see a high positive rate of testing, obviously we are under-testing. So when the absolute numbers are only taken by themselves, they don’t actually mean anything The test must be conducted in the context of how many tests have been completed and the positive rate of tests.”

The hospital had to shut out the patient, and the room and crematorium could not handle the accumulation of bodies.

Photographs and TV images of burning firewood in the parking lot, as well as corpses looted on the banks of the Ganges, made the government even more impatient with the crisis.

Official figures seriously underestimate the actual impact of the epidemic, which is widely accepted. Some experts say that the actual number of infections and deaths may be 5 to 10 times higher.

The first wave of pandemics in India peaked in September and was mainly concentrated in urban areas where testing was conducted faster, while the second wave of pandemics that broke out in February is spreading in rural areas, about two-thirds. There are 1.35 billion people living in the country, and testing in these places is very scarce.

“The decline in the number of confirmed COVID cases in the United States is just an illusion,” S Vincent Rajkumar, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in the United States, said on Twitter.

“First, the total number of cases is greatly underestimated due to limited testing. Second, confirmed cases will only occur if you can confirm: urban areas. Rural areas are not counted.”

Although the lockdown has helped limit cases in parts of the country that were hit by the initial surge in infections in February and April, such as Maharashtra and Delhi, rural areas and some states are responding to new cases. There is a surge in infections.

Al Jazeera’s Pavni Mittal reported in New Delhi that a court in northern Uttar Pradesh (the most populous court in India) has “reverberated” with a small number of coronavirus cases and has a strong impact on the medical infrastructure in rural areas. The facility made some “stern observations.” “There is only one bed for every 10,000 people.”

Mittal said the court instructed the state government to increase testing in rural areas.

The federal government issued detailed guidelines on Sunday to monitor COVID-19 cases from the Ministry of Health. The Ministry of Health requires villages to find people with flu-like illnesses and test them for COVID-19.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Narendra Modi) came under fire for sending a message to the public, deciding to leave key decisions to the states, and slowly launching an immunization campaign among the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers.

India has provided full vaccination for more than 40.4 million people, or 2.9% of the population.

A top virologist resigned on Sunday from the government’s scientific advisory forum, which was established by the government to detect variants of the coronavirus.

Shahid Jameel, chairman of the forum’s scientific advisory panel, declined to disclose the reason for his resignation, but he said he was concerned that the authorities did not pay enough attention to the evidence when formulating policies.