COVID India: What’s causing new COVID cases to decline in India? Much of the population is already infected, experts say

India has recorded one of the lowest daily coronavirus cases and daily death counts due to COVID-19 per million population in the past week, according to government data.

“India reported one of the lowest cases per million inhabitants in the world (158) in the last 7 days; much lower than many other countries in the Western Hemisphere, ”the Union’s Health Ministry said in a statement.

The global average for the past seven days was 553 cases per million, with many advanced countries registering high numbers: France 1,252 cases, Russia 1,330 cases, Brazil 1,387 cases, UK 1,753, Italy 1,934, and the US 4,310 COVID cases -19. per million inhabitants in the same period.

India has recorded one case of deaths per 2 million people in the past seven days, central government data shows. Again, this also compares favorably with the rest of the world. The world average is ten new deaths per million inhabitants in the last seven days. Italy is the most affected with 75 deaths, while the US (49 deaths), France (43), the United Kingdom (43) deaths, Russia (26) and Brazil 23 deaths per million inhabitants in the last seven days due to the COVID-19. they were also badly affected.

“The trend of more daily recoveries than daily cases has led to a continued contraction in the number of active cases in India,” the Health Ministry said.

Although India will soon reach a reported case count of 1 crore, it is clear that the apocalyptic scenario of tens of billions of people dying from COVID has thankfully not happened. While the launch of the vaccine is expected in February, the precise reasons for the decline in cases in India remain a mystery. But some experts believe they may have a plausible explanation.

Explaining the numbers

Simply put, the number of Indians who have actually been infected due to the coronavirus at some point or another since March is much higher than the reported figures; this is what some experts believe.

They feel that is the only way that can explain the fact that the country’s daily case count has remained below 50,000 in the past six weeks despite the holiday season, elections and a protest from farmers. It has taken over at least three states.

Each of these were (and are) potentially super-different events, but that kind of spike in cases hasn’t been seen in most of the country, except perhaps in Delhi, where the recorded case count soared due to the season of Diwali shopping when hundreds of thousands of Delhi residents flocked to the city’s crowded bazaars.

So, according to these experts, a drastically high number of Indians, perhaps even more than half of the entire population, may have already contracted the virus, leading to the prevalence of natural group immunity.

Manindra Agarwal, a researcher at IIT Kanpur who served on a government-appointed committee that mapped the trajectory of the pandemic in the country using a mathematical model, said The Indian Express that the model predicted that as of December 12, a whopping 55 percent of the population could have been infected.

That’s much higher than the various serosurveys have been predicting. Why serosurveys have failed to capture this plausible massive increase is a matter of debate.

According to the model Agrawal and his team were working with, the prevalence of the disease is as high as 65 percent in Bihar, according to the Express report.

If this theory is correct, it indicates that a large number of Indians contracted the virus without even being aware of it, or contracted a very mild form of the disease that was similar to the common cold.

However, more research is needed to conclusively prove what some of these experts suggest.