DW BUREAU / Chandigarh Punjab's COVID-19 death toll jumped to 1,348 with 41 more fatalities, while the state's infection tally rose to 50,848 with 1,474 new cases reported on Saturday, according to an official bulletin. Seventeen fatalities were reported from Ludhiana, ten from Patiala, three from Jalandhar and two each from Amritsar, Fatehgarh Sahib, Hoshiarpur and Moga and one each from Faridkot, Fazilka and Mohali, the bulletin said. The places which reported new cases include Ludhiana (272), Patiala (145), Mohali (137), Amritsar (114), Ferozepur (119) and Pathankot (81), it said. A total of 1,083 coronavirus patients were discharged after they recovered from the infection and so far there have been 34,091 recoveries in the state, according to the bulletin. There are 15,409 active COVID-19 cases in the state as of now, it said. Sixty-nine critical patients are on ventilator support while 475 are on oxygen support, the bulletin said.With a collection of 18,613 more samples for COVID testing, the figure of total samples taken so far for testing has reached 10,26,465 in the state, it said. India's COVID-19 tally raced past 34 lakh with a single-day spike of 76,472 cases, while the number of recoveries surged to 26,48,998, pushing the recovery rate to 76.47 per cent on Saturday, according to the Union health ministry. The total number of COVID-19 cases rose to 34,63,972, while the death toll due to the disease climbed to 62,550 with 1,021 people succumbing to it in a span of 24 hours, the ministry's data updated at 8 am showed. The COVID-19 case fatality rate has further declined to 1.81 per cent in the country. There are 7,52,424 active coronavirus cases in the country currently, which account for 21.72 per cent of the total caseload, the data showed. India's COVID-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7 and the 30-lakh mark on August 23. According to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), a total of 4,04,066,09 samples were tested for COVID-19 up to August 28, including 9,28,761 on Friday. Of the 1,021 fresh deaths, 331 were in Maharashtra, 136 in Karnataka, 102 in Tamil Nadu, 81 in Andhra Pradesh, 77 in Uttar Pradesh, 56 in West Bengal, 51 in Punjab, 20 each in Bihar and Delhi, 17 in Madhya Pradesh, 15 in Haryana, 14 in Gujarat, 12 in Rajasthan, 11 in Uttarakhand. Nine fatalities each were reported from Puducherry and Telangana, eight each from Assam, Jharkhand and Odisha. (editor@dailyworld.in)