By Quaid Najmi

Mumbai, May 23 (IANS): Covid-19 continued its death march in Maharashtra, claiming 60 more lives on Saturday and infecting 2,608 more persons, the second-highest number of cases on a single day after 2,940 notched on Friday, health officials said.

This comes to roughly one death every 24 minutes, and a staggering average 108 new cases recorded every hour in the state for the day.

The western state has been recording fatalities above 50 and new patients over 2K daily for the past one week now.

With 60 fatalities -- down by 16 from highest 76 notched on May 19 -- the state death toll has touched 1,577 and the total coronavirus patients to 47,190 on Friday compared with 44,582 on Friday.

The Health Department said of the total cases, 32,201 were active, swelling by a new high of 3,747 over Friday's 28,454.

Of the total 60 new fatalities, 40 were recorded in Mumbai alone, taking the city deaths up from Friday's 909 to 949, while the number of positive patients here shot up by 1,566 cases to touch 28,817.

Besides Mumbai's 40 deaths, there were 14 in Pune, 2 in Solapur, and one each in Palghar, Thane, Satara and Nanded.

The dead included 41 men and 19 women, with nearly 60 per cent suffering from other serious ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, and asthma.

On the positive side, 821 cured patients returned home on Saturday, taking the total such numbers to 13,404.

Responding to the Chief Minister's call recently, over 21,750 people have applied to work as corona warriors, including 12,100 directly connected to the health sector as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians, ward boys, and paramedics etc.

The remaining 9,650 are from IT, teachers, security services, social workers etc. More than 3,700 of the total have expressed their readiness to serve in the Red Zones across the state, besides 3,750 who want to work in the huge Wuhan-type hospital set up in Mumbai, Uddhav Thackeray said.

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region (Thane division, comprising Mumbai, Thane, Palghar and Raigad) continued to cause grave concerns with 1,069 Covid-19 deaths and positive cases shooting to 36,173.

Though trailing a distant second after Mumbai, Pune division's fatalities touched 297, besides 6,118 corona patients.

The next major area of concern is Nashik division with 103 deaths and 1,535 positive cases, followed by Aurangabad division with 43 fatalities and 1,407 cases, and finally Akola division with 34 deaths and 689 cases.

Latur division has 7 deaths and 220 cases, Kolhapur division 5 deaths and 455 patients, and finally Nagpur division 8 deaths and 545 cases.

Meanwhile, the number of people sent to home quarantine increased from 469,275 to 485,623 on Saturday -- a jump of 16,348 -- and those in institutional quarantine went up from 28,430 to 33,545, a spurt of 5,115. The state's containment zones shot up from 1,949 to 2,345 on Saturday.

As many as 16,414 health teams have carried out a survey of a population of around 65.9 lakh in the state.