India's COVID-19 deaths surpass 55,000, total cases near 3 million

India's COVID-19 tally rose to 2,975,701 and death toll due to the pandemic in the country also surged to 55,794 on Saturday, revealed the latest data released by the federal health ministry.

As many as 69,878 new cases and 945 deaths were reported during the past 24 hours.

According to the data, there are still 697,330 active cases across India, even as 2,222,577 people have been successfully cured and discharged from hospitals.

Over the past few weeks, Indian government's focus has been on ramping up the testing of COVID-19 samples.

Till Friday a total of 34,491,073 samples had been tested, out of which 1,023,836 were tested on Friday alone, according to the latest data released by the Indian Council of Medical Research.

This is the first time when more than 1 million samples were tested in a single day.