By Quaid Najmi

Mumbai, May 16 (IANS): Maharashtra on Saturday recorded the highest number of 1,606 new cases and a new high of 67 deaths, with Mumbai also notching a fresh high of 41 deaths, health officials said.

This comes to a death rate of roughly 1 fatality every 20 minutes for the state.

However, the state health department said that while 22 deaths occurred today (in the past 24 hours), the remaining 42 fatalities occurred between April 15-May 14 which have been validated and confirmed as Covid-19 cases today.

With 67 fatalities -- up from the previous high of 54 notched on May 13, the state death toll toll now stands at 1,135 and the total number of coronavirus patients increased from 29,100 yesterday to 30,706 today, after the steepest single-day jump of 1,602 recorded on May 14.

Of the total deaths, 41 were recorded in Mumbai alone, taking up the city's toll from Friday's 655 to 696 now, and the number of Covid-19 positive patients in the city shot up by 884 to touch 18,555 today.

Mumbai's Dharavi slum alone continued to be a major hotspot and a headache for the health authorities, notching 53 new cases, taking the total number of patients to 1,198, and 53 deaths to date.

Besides Mumbai's 41, there were 9 deaths in Thane district, 7 in Pune, 5 in Aurangabad, 3 in Jalgaon, one each in Nashik and Jalgaon.

They comprised 47 men and 20 women, and nearly 66 per cent of them suffered from other serious ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, heart problems and asthma.

On the positive side, 524 more fully cured patients returned home, taking the number of those discharged to 7,088.

In anticipation of an even bloodier war with the virus in the coming days, the government continued to fortify itself by requisitioning the famed Wankhede Stadium premises to set up a jumbo quarantine facility.

This will be the second such facility in a sports complex after a huge 1,000-plus facility has come up in the National Sports Club of India, and at the Bandra Kurla Complex and NESCO grounds in Goregaon.

With a view to reducing the travails of stranded migrants, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray and Nationalist Congress Party President Sharad Pawar spoke with Bihar CM Nitish Kumar and West Bengal CM Mamta Banerjee and two trains carrying migrants to Gaya and Kolkata left from this state.

In another humanitarian gesture, the state has so far deployed 11,380 ST buses to give a free drop to 1.46 lakh migrants up to the borders of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Karnataka to enable them to reach their homes.

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region (Thane Division) continued to cause huge concerns with 768 Covid-19 deaths and cases shooting to 23,193, with Thane district notching 49 deaths, Palghar 13 and Raigad 12 fatalities so far.

Though trailing a distant second after Mumbai, Pune Division fatalities cross the 200-mark to touch 212 fatalities besides 4,149 patients.

The next major area of concern is Nashik Division with 78 deaths and 1,256 positive cases, followed by Akola Division with 28 deaths and 466 cases, and finally Aurangabad with 26 fatalities and 966 patients.

There's also Kolhapur Division with 5 deaths and 173 patients, Latur Division with 5 fatalities and 101 cases, and finally Nagpur Division with 3 deaths and 361 patients.

Meanwhile, the number of people sent to home-quarantine increased from 329,302 to 334,558, and those in institutional quarantine went up from 16,306 to 17,048, while the state's containment zones increased from 1,473 to 1,516 on Saturday.

As many as 14,434 teams have carried out a survey of a population of around 61 lakhs in the state to date.