India on Monday recorded 103,558 new Covid-19 cases over the previous 24 hours, amid indications the number of active patients under the current epidemic growth rate would within days surpass the previous peak count of about a million.

The Union health ministry said the country’s total caseload of active patients on Monday increased by over 50,200 to around 741,800, only about quarter of a million cases less than the peak count of a little over one million recorded during mid-September last year.

Eight states — Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab — currently show the sharpest rise in daily new cases and account for nearly 82 per cent of the country’s new cases. Maharashtra alone accounted for more than 57,000 daily new cases followed by about 5,000 in Chhattisgarh, 4,500 in Karnataka and about 4,000 each in Chhattisgarh and Delhi.

The Centre has sent 50 public health teams to 30 districts in Maharashtra, 11 districts in Chhattisgarh, and nine in Punjab for control measures in areas that have reported “very large numbers of daily new Covid-19 cases and daily deaths”.

The teams will guide local authorities on testing, contact tracing, surveillance and containment measures, hospital infrastructure, intensive care, ventilators and oxygen, enforcement of Covid-19 appropriate behaviour by the public and vaccination.

Health officials and critical care medicine specialists are concerned that at this growth rate, the caseloads could quickly overwhelm healthcare facilities in some areas, particularly intensive care units and ventilators.

A top health official has said the Centre and states had collectively last year prepared hospital facilities to meet a daily new case count of about 150,000 patients. But doctors underline that the average doesn’t really matter when neither hospital facilities nor infections are unevenly distributed.

“The previous wave didn’t go beyond about 97,000 daily cases — so the nation as a whole did not experience any gross shortages in facilities, but there were times around April when many patients were unable to find place in hospitals,” a health expert said.

The Centre has urged states to address laxity about wearing masks and avoiding crowds among the public and lack of appropriate and efficient public health and containment measures by local health authorities in areas with clusters of infections.

The Union health ministry has directed states to aggressively pursue a policy to contain outbreaks and accelerate the vaccination campaign that hasn’t moved as fast as health officials had hoped it would because, some experts suspect, persisting levels of vaccine hesitancy among some recipients.

The campaign has so far inoculated about 10.5 million people with both doses of the vaccines required to protect them. Medical advisers to the campaign are worried that at such a slow pace, the vaccination campaign will do little to curb the epidemic’s current growth phase.

Illegal beneficiaries

Amid the slow campaign, the health ministry has asked the Delhi government to send a showcause notice to two private hospitals in the national capital which had allegedly registered beneficiaries below the age of 45 years as healthcare and frontline workers to vaccinate them.

The ministry said the hospitals had violated Covid-19 vaccination norms.