The Covid toll reached 177 in state on Sunday after nine patients, including three from East Singhbhum and two from Ranchi, died during treatment, figures released by the National Health Mission (NHM) stated.

East Singhbhum, the 2nd worst-affected district in Jharkhand, has already reported 66 Covid deaths, which is more than 35 per cent of the total casualty count in state. Ranchi, which has the highest number of active cases, has reported 31 deaths so far as per government data.

As many as 530 fresh cases of infection surfaced in state on Sunday, taking Jharkhand's Covid tally to 18156. However, state's Covid recovery rate touched 50 per cent on Sunday as 607 patients were discharged from hospital after recovering from the infection. Jharkhand's recovery rate had nosedived below 35 per cent in July, when cases skyrocketed and relatively fewer recoveries were reported, health officials said.

On Sunday out of 5182 samples collected, 4953 samples were tested and 530 were found to be positive. The total number of recoveries in State surpassed the count of active cases on Sunday. As per NHM bulletin, as many as 8998 people have recovered so far and 8981 are infected by SARS-CoV-2 virus in Jharkhand.

As per government figures, Garhwa reported 85 fresh cases on Sunday, the highest among all districts. Ranchi, which has been witnessing triple-digit-spike in cases every day lately, reported 71 fresh cases of infection on Sunday, while East Singhbhum reported 48 cases.

The tally in Ranchi was 3563 on Sunday. Meanwhile, Dhanbad became the third district to have over 1000 Covid cases after Ranchi and East Singhbhum. The tally in East Singhbhum was 2792 while in Dhanbad it was 1004.

On August 8 night, Ranchi topped the list after detecting a maximum of 412 cases, the highest ever single-day spike of any district. Besides, Giridih reported the second highest number of cases adding 286 patients.

Of the 14 deaths reported on Saturday, seven occurred in East Singhbhum’s Jamshedpur, four in Dhanbad and one each in Ranchi, Godda and Koderma districts.

The Centre on Saturday advised 13 districts including Ranchi across eight states and a Union territories to focus on ramping up testing and addressing delays in diagnosis results, flagging that the coronavirus disease case fatality rate in these regions was higher than the national average and that they contributed 14% of all deaths due to the disease in India.