India reported 2.34 lakh fresh cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours. That was the highest single-day spike in COVID-19 cases in the country.
On Saturday, India reported 2,34,692 fresh cases and 1,341 deaths, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare data showed. This is the third consecutive day of over 2 lakh cases in the country. The overall COVID-19 cases in the country have risen to 1,45,26,609, and death toll has reached 1,75,649.
Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, and Karnataka are the states which have contributed most to the rising cases of coronavirus in the country. Maharashtra alone accounts for 27.15 per cent of fresh COVID-19 cases in the country.
Accordingly, experts have estimated that the second wave of COVID-19, or the massive surge in the number of infections, is likely to see a sharp increase from mid-April until May 2021. A message falsely claiming to be a list of people ready to donate plasma in India is being shared over social media amid this COVID-19 pandemic. Plasma therapy, which uses the plasma of recovered COVID-19 patients, is one of the investigational therapies being tried in India as part of the effort to fight the virus. Recovered COVID patients’ immune systems may have created antibodies that fight the novel coronavirus. These antibodies build up and can be found in plasma, the liquid part of blood.
Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the claim to be misleading. This is an old list of blood donors which is in circulation on social media at least since 2015. It has no relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. On searching the names mentioned in the viral list it was found that the same list containing more than 50 names was shared with the hashtag “#blooddonors” on December 5, 2015, on a Tamil Nadu-based Facebook page The New Face of Society (TNFS). Over the years, the same list was shared by multiple Facebook pages with different claims. In 2016, a Facebook page named BLOOD DONORS shared the same list as from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The same list was also shared on a blog called I Love Trichy and medium.com in 2016 and 2017 respectively as a list of blood donors in Tamil Nadu. V Mohan, one of the people named in the list, confirmed that this was a group of blood donors based in Chennai, which had been made two or three years ago and said that it had nothing to do with plasma donation in the COVID context.
Therefore, it is clear that an old list of blood donors is being circulated as that of plasma donors in context of the coronavirus pandemic
