The death toll from the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in India surpassed the 100,000 mark on Friday, a grim milestone that comes exactly seven months from the day the first batch of cases was reported in the country.
India became the third country in the world to cross this milestone: only the United States (212,000 deaths) and Brazil (144,000 deaths) have reported more deaths, but it does so with a significantly better death rate than almost all other countries that have seen large buds. India’s case fatality rate (CFR), the death ratio to the number of confirmed cases, stands at 1.56%, which is not only half the world average (2.98%), but also better than comparable rates in the US (2.84%) and Brazil (2.99%).
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However, since the first week of September, daily deaths in India have exceeded those of any country in the world. On average, 1,065 people have died every day during the last week in the country, compared to 755 average daily deaths in the United States and 713 in Brazil in the same period.
This has made India the largest contributor to the global death toll: one in five deaths (19%) in the world in the last week came from India. The first death due to Covid-19 was reported on March 12 in Karnataka, with the 100,000th death occurring 204 days later. If India’s deaths are divided into four phases of 25,000 deaths each, each one has become shorter than the last. While the first 25,000 deaths took 127 days (on July 16), India crossed the 50,000 mark just 30 days later (on August 15). The deaths crossed the 75,000 mark another 25 days later, on September 9, with the last 25,000 deaths occurring in just 23 days.
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India’s seven-day average of deaths has been above the 1,000 mark for the past 28 days, according to HT’s Covid-19 panel. At its peak (so far), this number touched 1,166 for the week ending September 19. It has certainly declined slightly in recent days and is 1,069 like Friday. The US alone, where the trajectory reached 2,300 deaths per day during the week ending April 21, has seen more people die steadily.
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As of Friday night, of the 6.47 million infected people in the country, 100,896 lost their lives and more than 5.42 million recovered. However, the death toll is expected to continue to rise as the country continues to add 81,431 new cases per day on average, and of those around 1.5% (according to India’s CFR) will succumb to the disease.
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Government experts have attributed India’s relatively better Covid-19 death rate to a number of factors such as experience in treating other lung diseases such as tuberculosis and early interventions in terms of the national lockdown. “These things were crucial in identifying those infected and isolating them as required very early in the disease stage,” said Dr. Samiran Panda, director of epidemiology and communicable diseases at the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR).
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Independent experts said the country’s relatively younger population may also have helped reduce mortality. “It is not surprising that fewer people die in India from Covid as the severity of the infection is low in the country, which among other factors can be attributed to a better state of immunity to fight any infection, and also to a relatively younger population with fewer comorbidities, “said Dr NK Mehra, former Director of Transplantation, Immunology and Immunogenetics, Indian Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi.
The fact that the outbreak in India started relatively later than in the Western world may also have worked to the benefit of India on the CFR front. This becomes particularly apparent because as the disease progresses, scientists and doctors have learned to better fight and treat it. As a result, the CFR has been improving, both in India and in the rest of the world. India’s CFR has halved since the beginning of July – it was 3% on July 1.
“Obviously, we now know the disease much better and we managed to save most of the hospitalized patients. The death rate is less than 2%, which is decent compared to other countries, ”said Dr GC Khilnani, former director of the department of pulmonology at the Indian Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.
However, the proportion of deaths between states has been largely uneven, with Maharashtra (37,480 deaths as of Friday) accounting for 37% of all deaths in the country. It is followed by Tamil Nadu with 9,653 dead and Karnataka with 9,119 dead.
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