Coronavirus Cases in India, Death Update

At the Sector 25 cremation ground in Chandigarh. (Express photo: Jaipal Singh)

Cases and deaths from coronavirus in India: For three consecutive days, the number of coronavirus-related deaths in the country has exceeded 1,000. There have been days before when more deaths have been reported, but these have been primarily the result of some states collecting large numbers of previously unreported deaths. Never before have more than 1,000 deaths been reported on two consecutive days. And in the last three days, there hasn’t been an unusual addition of deaths from previous days.

The increase in the number of deaths has coincided with a big jump in the number of new infections detected. More than 75,000 new cases have been discovered in the last two days. Before this, the numbers had stayed well below 70,000 for more than three weeks. Therefore, it can be tempting to correlate the increase in cases and the increase in deaths as part of the same trend. But that is not the case.

The increase in daily deaths from Covid-19 in India

The people who die are not from the same batch that is infected that day. They generally belong to groups that were positive two to three weeks earlier. There have been reports of people dying a day or two after being detected as positive, but these are small numbers. In most cases, deaths occur after several days after the person is infected. But there is no fixed time lag, and therefore it is difficult to correlate a particular outbreak episode in the death count with a corresponding increase in the number of cases.

It is for this reason that case fatality numbers, a metric that is regularly used to assess how fatal the disease is, should also be read with caution. India currently has a fatality rate (CFR) of 1.82 percent, almost half the world average. This means that 1.82% of people detected as positive in India have died, while, globally, this figure is close to 3.4%. The CFR in India has been in constant decline, and that is also a positive sign.

But 1.82% is slightly wrong because it is obtained by dividing the total number of currently detected cases by the total number of deaths that have occurred. But, as we have seen, people do not die the same day they are infected. The deaths that occur today come from the group of people who were infected with the disease two to three weeks earlier. Therefore, a more accurate CFR would be obtained using the total number of infected people from two to three weeks ago as the denominator. This would be substantially less than the number of people infected today and therefore a more accurate CFR would be much higher than the current 1.82%.

If we use the total number of infected people from two weeks ago, the CFR increases to about 2.4 percent. But even this wouldn’t be entirely accurate, because, as noted above, there is no set time frame for deaths. Obtaining an accurate CFR, when the epidemic is still evolving, required careful monitoring of individual cases, and some research groups in the country are working on this.

But the real assessment of how fatal the disease has been can only be known when the full spread of the disease is known. Since the majority of infected people are never detected, the actual number of infected people is believed to be much higher than the numbers detected show. This has been revealed by the various serological surveys made in the country. These surveys have suggested that the actual spread of the virus could be 20 to 40 times greater than the amount detected by diagnostic tests. In such an eventuality, the actual death rate would be much lower. Scientists believe that by the time the current epidemic comes to an end, the actual death rate will not be more than one percent.

The Daily Increase in New Covid-19 Cases in India

More than 77,000 new cases were detected in the country on Thursday, some 2,000 more than the day before. India is not only reporting the highest number of cases in the world so far, it has recorded the highest number of any country at any time during this pandemic. The death count has passed 61,500 and is very likely to exceed the death count in Mexico on Friday. That would leave India behind only the United States and Brazil in the number of people who have succumbed to the Covid-19 disease. In the United States, more than 184,000 people have died from the disease so far, while Brazil has so far counted more than 118,000 deaths.

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The top ten states with the maximum load of cases:

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