Up to 78,761 new cases were added on Sunday, the most any country has reported in one day.
India is fast becoming the world’s newest virus epicenter, setting a record for the largest increase in cases in a single day, as experts predict it will soon pass Brazil, and ultimately the United States, as the worst. outbreak globally.
Up to 78,761 new cases were added on Sunday, the most any country has reported in one day, while 971 deaths were reported on Monday, pushing the Asian country beyond Mexico for the third-highest number of deaths in all. the world. On the current trajectory, the outbreak in India will eclipse that of Brazil in about a week and that of the US in about two months.
And unlike the US and Brazil, India’s case growth is still accelerating seven months after the notification of its first coronavirus case on January 30. The pathogen has just entered the vast rural interior where most of its 1.3 billion inhabitants live, after racing. through its dense megacities.
As the world’s second-largest country and one with a relatively poor public health system, India’s outbreak is bound to become the world’s largest, said Naman Shah, an adjunct faculty member at the National Institute of Epidemiology of the United States. country.
“It would not be surprising regardless of what India does,” said Shah, a member of the Indian government’s Covid-19 task force.
And unlike the US and Brazil, India’s case growth is still accelerating seven months after the notification of its first coronavirus case on January 30.
From the Philippines to Peru, the new coronavirus poses a unique problem for poor countries: the densely populated slums where millions of their citizens live present ideal conditions for the virus to spread, while their economic precariousness makes the closures necessary to contain the pathogen are intolerable.
Across the developing world, economies have been forced to open up even with the virus still rampant, rapidly overwhelming underfunded hospitals.
Consequently, the list of countries hardest hit globally has shifted from rich to poor as the pandemic rages across the world. Where previously countries such as Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom had the largest outbreaks and the highest number of deaths, now the United States is the only advanced economy in the top ten, among other developing nations such as Mexico, Peru and South Africa.
Nowhere has the plight of the developing world manifested itself more viscerally than in India, where an ambitious national blockade imposed in March was lifted after two months when unemployment, hunger and a mass migration of workers out of the country. cities on foot became unbearable.
Since then, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has advised the population to “live with the virus” while giving local officials the freedom to impose state-by-state restrictions, which many have done. The economy is projected to have contracted 18% in the quarter to June from a year earlier, more than any other major Asian country.
Since antibody studies in the capital New Delhi and other cities show that the number of people with signs of past infections is 40 to 200 times higher than the official case count, the true size of India’s epidemic it is probably much higher than the 3.6 million infections that have been reported. .
And there are many reasons to believe that the coronavirus is still starting in India. Much of the country’s coronavirus burden has so far fallen on its globally connected megacities like New Delhi and Mumbai, but the disease is now beginning to move to its rural hinterland where nearly 900 million people live and the healthcare infrastructure is limited. The lack of tests and medical help likely means that dozens of infections and deaths go unreported.
“The disease is moving from urban to rural areas, it is moving from states with better health care infrastructure to other places,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for the Economics and Policy of Disease Dynamics, with headquarters in New Delhi and Washington, DC. “All of that means there will be more deaths, but they won’t be counted because they won’t be visible anywhere.”
The Modi government has often pointed to India’s official death rate of around 1.8%, among the lowest in the world, as evidence that it is controlling the spread of the virus, even if it does not contain it.
But deaths are likely to be substantially underestimated and skewed by the country’s disproportionately young population: 65% are under 35, the segment least at risk of dying from Covid-19. An age-adjusted analysis of India’s death rate by three economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research in Massachusetts found that India’s death rate was similar to the world average.
“What we have done is delay infections, but we have not been able to reduce transmission,” said Laxminarayan of the CDDEP. “And that was never going to be possible in a country the size of India and with the healthcare infrastructure that India has. What has happened is almost exactly what one should have expected.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
.
