Jharkhand's Covid-19 fatalities crossed the 600 mark on Friday with six casualties reported in the past 24 hours.

The State's death-count now stands at 602 while the total case load peaked to 68, 578 after 1478 new cases were recorded, state health department's bulletin issued on Friday night has stated. Of the total cases, 13697 are active and 52,807 have been recovered.

Ranchi and East Singhbhum continued to report maximum spikes with 494 and 374 cases respectively in the past 24 hours.

In terms of casualties, East Singhbhum continued to top among all the 24 districts with a total of nine casualties in 48 hours--six on Thursday and three on Friday. However, Ranchi saw three deaths on Thursday but managed to keep its slate clean on Friday.

Ranchi district administration officials said that the spikes in their district has been because of the special drives for covid testing. An official of district covid taskforce said, "We have been focussing on routine drives to screen as many people as we can, hence, figures of infected people is on rise. For example, during a special testing drive between Sep 16-18, we took samples of 9143 people of which 311 tested positive. Drives will contine further."

On the other hand, the state's seven days growth rate and seven days doubling rate, still higher than the national average, improved in comparison to the national level with 2.16 percent and 32 days respectively vis-a-vis 1.89 percent and 37 days nationally. With 0.89 percent, state's mortality rate however remains far lower than the national average of 1.60 percent.