Maharashtra is the state, province or region most affected by Covid-19 in the world. The western state of India, the most industrialized in the country, home to India’s commercial capital Mumbai, saw 943,772 cases of the coronavirus disease as of Tuesday evening, according to the HT panel. If it were a country, Maharashtra would be No. 5 in terms of the number of Covid-19 cases.
But it is not the only Indian state on a list of top provinces by cases. Andhra Pradesh, with 517,094, ranks 6th; Tamil Nadu, with 474,940 cases at # 7, and Karnataka, with 412,190 cases at # 9. Uttar Pradesh, with 278,473 cases, is outside the top 10, at number 11.
India is now adding more cases per day (even when taking an average of seven days) than any other country – more cases per day than China has seen in the entire course of the disease, although the figures for that country are inexplicably casualties and the pandemic run there markedly different from its trajectory in all other countries of the world. The geographical area and the population link the three countries most affected by the coronavirus disease, the United States, Brazil and India. And it is inconceivable that China, which is third in terms of geographic area, and first in terms of population, and where the viral infection began (in Wuhan), has seen only 85,000 cases. An earlier issue of this column (Dispatch 119, published July 31) looked at some possible answers to this mystery.
But we don’t need to go as far as China for a mystery. This writer, for example, only needs to travel about 30 km for one: Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India with 225 million people. If it were a country, it would be the fifth or sixth most populous in the world. It has performed almost 30,000 tests per million, which means that it has tested about 3% of its population, a proportion that is not insignificant. However, it has only seen 278,483 cases of Covid so far (as of Tuesday night). His overall positivity rate is 4.11%. Its fatality rate is 1.45%, lower than that of India. And this is a state with one of the worst social indicators in the country.
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It’s not that Uttar Pradesh’s positivity rate (number of people who test positive in number of tests) has reached this level after traversing the usual curve that this metric makes; it has practically remained at the same level. The highest it reached in an average of seven days (since it began analyzing at least 1,000 samples per day) was 6.4% and the lowest 2.1%.
Interestingly, the trend observed in Uttar Pradesh is not much different from that of many African countries (most have social indicators comparable to those of the Indian state). Africa’s relatively low number of cases and deaths, experts say, can only be partially explained by underreporting of cases or gaps in death records. Scattered antibody tests that have been carried out across the continent show that there has been significant exposure to the Sars-CoV-2 virus in many African countries, with a test in Kenya highlighting a prevalence of around 20%.
Two theories are circulating as possible explanations for the remarkable figures from Africa. One revolves around the relatively younger population on the continent. The median age in many African countries is in the 20s. The average age in Uttar Pradesh is also in the early 20s, among the lowest in India. The other is that populations in many African countries may have been exposed to other coronaviruses, including other infectious diseases, giving them greater immunity to Sars-CoV-2. The same can be said for the population of Uttar Pradesh.
Of course, there is a third theory. That Africa’s numbers are just a temporary aberration and that, eventually, the continent’s countries will begin to see Covid-19 infection curves similar to those seen in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. That could also be true in Uttar Pradesh.
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