By Saurabh Sharma
LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) – India on Thursday reported a record increase in its coronavirus cases with nearly 67,000 new infections, adding a devout leader who shared a level with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a rite to liberate the structure of a giant temple.
Nritya Gopal Das, an 82-year-old Hindu priest, the public figure inactive to test positive after a number of high-level colleagues in Modi’s closet were hit by COVID-19, home secretary Amit Shah added.
With Thursday’s jump of 66,999 cases, India now has about 2.4 million infections, according to the Department of Health, only the United States and Brazil. Over the past fortnight, he has reported 50,000 or more cases each day when he opened the country after a month closing. His death toll on COVID-19 is 47,033.
Modi and Das were among 170 other people who attended the launch of the temple structure on August 5 in the northern city of Ayodhya.
Dr Murli Singh, data director at Ayodhya, said Das had tested positive and was being transferred to a hospital near Delhi. But he added that at the time of the ceremony, the priest had tested negative and did not pose a threat of infection to Modi.
Television photographs showed Modi holding Das’s hands and bowing to him. Modi’s workplace did not respond to a request for comment.
Singh said the other people invited for the release were all of the virus at the time.
“Guidelines were sent to everyone so that only the other negative people in COVID-19 could participate in the ceremony,” he said, adding that the doctors at the floor in Ayodhya had conducted tests before the occasion began.
The planned temple in Ayodhya is located in a debatable site where Hindu teams have been campaigning for decades.
On Wednesday, a government committee said the country would use its enormous vaccine production capacity to urgently deliver any COVID-19 vaccines to its neighbors and low-income countries.
(Additional report through Anuron Kumar Mitra and Krishna Das; written through Shilpa Jamkhandikar; edited through Sanjeev Miglani and Frances Kerry)