Mumbai, Oct 14 (IANS): For the third day straight, Maharashtra's Covid-19 deaths remained below the 200 mark on Wednesday though the case tally rose above 10,000, even as the figure of recovered patients crossed the 13 lakh mark, health officials said.

The state witnessed 158 fatalities -- less than a third compared to the peak of 515 (September 15), and even lower that 165 (October 12), 178 (June 15) and 187 (October 13), taking up the toll to 40,859.

A total of 10,552 new cases were recorded on Wednesday, taking the tally to 15,54,389.

In a great relief, the state recovery rate rose for the eighth day - from 84.03 per cent to 84.71 per cent - while the mortality rate fell marginally to 2.63 per cent after remaining at 2.64 percent for 11 days.

A total of 19,517 fully recovered patients returned home - taking up the total number of discharged patients from 12,97,252 to 13,16,769, against the 196,288 active cases in the state.

As per Wednesday's figures, there was one death roughly every 9 minutes and 440 new cases added every hour to the state tally.

Of the 158 deaths, Mumbai led with 48 fatalities, while there were 20 deaths in Thane, 15 in Satara, 12 each in Pune and Nagpur, nine in Nashik, seven in Raigad, six in Solapur, five in Sangli, three each in Kolhapur, Jalna, Latur, and Bhandara, two each in Aurangabad, Osmanabad, and Chandrapur, and one each in Palghar, Jalgaon, Nandurbar, Beed, Yavatmal, and Buldhana.

Remaining in the sub-50 range for the 13th day this month, Mumbai's new deaths took its toll to 9,555 while the number of corona cases shot up by 2,211 to 234,602.

The Mumbai circle saw 76 fatalities, or nearly half of the total state's new deaths, taking its toll shot to 17,136, while 4,029 new cases, more than 40 percent of the state's new cases, took the total to 539,243.

With another 33 fatalities, the Pune circle's death toll rose to 8,881 and the daily infections increased by 2,130 to 403,525 cases.

Meanwhile, the number of people sent to home quarantine increased to 23,80,957, while the number of those in institutional quarantine went down to 23,176.