India’s official COVID-19 case tally yesterday passed 2 million after a daily jump of more than 60,000, making it only the third country to reach the figure, after the US and Brazil.
The rate of spread in the world’s second-most populous country also appears to be increasing. India logged its first one million infections just three weeks ago.
Official figures show that the country has recorded 2.03 million infections and 41,585 deaths, but many experts say that the true numbers might be much higher among its 1.3 billion people, many of whom live in some of the world’s most crowded cities.
Photo: AFP
Spending per capita on health care is feeble by international comparison.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government imposed one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in late March.
However, with Asia’s third-largest economy reeling — tens of millions of migrant workers lost their jobs almost overnight — the restrictions have been steadily eased.
Photo: AFP
Individual states and cities have been imposing more localized lockdowns including IT hub Bangalore last month, the eastern state of Bihar and part of Tamil Nadu in the south.
Previously, the main hotspots have been the teeming megacities of New Delhi and Mumbai, home to some of the world’s biggest slums, but now smaller cities and rural areas — where 70 percent of Indians live — have begun to see case numbers rising sharply.
India has tested about 16,500 people per million, compared with 190,000 in the US, according to a tally by Worldometer.
A study last week that tested for coronavirus antibodies reported that about 57 percent of people in Mumbai’s teeming slums have had the infection — far more than official data suggest.
A similar probe earlier in July indicated that almost a quarter of people in the capital, New Delhi, have had the virus — almost 40 times the official total.
Fatalities might also be higher than the official numbers.
Experts have said that even in normal times the cause of death is not properly recorded in large numbers of cases.
In smaller cities and in rural areas, people also ignore guidelines on social distancing and wearing masks, anecdotal evidence suggests.
Monsoon floods that have affected millions have also hindered efforts to fight the pandemic.
Some of those infected are also ostracized by their communities, leading to a stigmatization of the virus that puts people off being tested.
“There’s both the fear of the disease, as well as of isolation and quarantine,” said Rajib Kumar, who heads the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.
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