Coronavirus infections in India passed 1.5 million and deaths approached 35,000, but the results of tests in the city of Mumbai cast further doubt on official data in the world’s second most populous nation.
Despite the number of cases skyrocketing and more areas imposing blockades, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said this week that India was in a “better position than other countries” and won international praise.
The Federal Health Ministry website, which no longer lists total infections as the government puts more emphasis on recoveries, reported nearly 50,000 new infections and 768 more deaths on Wednesday.
The South Asian nation, home to some of the world’s most populous cities and where per capita healthcare spending is among the lowest in the world, passed a million cases just 12 days earlier.
Health worker examines people for COVID-19 symptoms in a poor neighborhood in Mumbai [Rafiq Maqbool/AP]
But many experts say India is not testing enough people, and that many coronavirus-related deaths are not recorded as such.
A study published Tuesday that tested antibodies to the coronavirus reported that about 57 percent of people in densely populated neighborhoods of Mumbai have had the infection, far more than official data suggests.
Ullas S Kolthur of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, who participated in conducting the survey, said he was surprised by the results.
“At least in the slums, we believe that it is largely because social distancing would not work simply due to population density,” Kolthur told the AFP news agency.
Last week, a similar study indicated that almost a quarter of people in the capital, New Delhi, have had the virus, that is, almost 40 times the official total.
However, there are also doubts about the accuracy of such tests, since other coronaviruses, not only the new coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, can also produce antibodies that could give a false positive result.
The Mumbai survey also covered a relatively small sample of approximately 7,000 people.
India now has the third highest number of cases in the world behind the United States and Brazil, although the official number of deaths in the South Asian nation is much lower.
As a proportion of its population, India also lags behind, with just 1,110 cases per million population compared to 13,148 for the U.S., according to an AFP count.
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