Jakarta. Indonesia recorded 54,517 fresh Covid-19 cases on Wednesday, the country’s highest daily tally since the outbreak began and the world’s highest by country so far in the day.

It’s for the third day in a row that Indonesia surpassed India in daily number of Covid cases.

Southeast Asia’s biggest country has accumulated a total of 2.67 million cases since the first cases were reported in March of last year, government figures show.

A further 991 Covid patients have died in the past 24 hours, bringing the total death toll to 69,210.

Earlier in the day, India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reported 38,792 new cases to take the country’s total to 3.09 million.

Indonesia meanwhile has surpassed 40,000 cases a day since Monday amid a dramatic surge in new infections blamed for the highly contagious Delta strain. India’s daily tally stood at 37,154 and 32,906 on Monday and Tuesday.

Indonesian health officials have said the Delta variant is responsible for more than 90 percent of recent cases.

The record-breaking run for three straight days is also attributed to improved testing capacity, with a record 172,159 people undertaking diagnostic test in the 24-hour period, beating the previous high of 159,354 tests.

The total number of active cases stands at 443,473, the highest ever since the outbreak started.

Jakarta led the daily count with 12,667 cases to take the capital’s total to 701,910.

West Java’s daily tally hit five digits for the first time with 10,444 new cases for a total of 477,585.

Indonesia has reimposed lockdown in provinces across Java and Bali since July 3, but the national Covid-19 task force said it won’t greatly affect the growth of newly cases until at least three weeks.

“It’s taking time -- at least three weeks since the lockdown took effect -- until we can put a brake on new infections,” Dewi Nur Aisyah, a task force official in charge of data management, said in a news conference.