India’s infections are 10 times the official figure, says the country’s top pandemic agency, citing a national study.
More than 60 million people in India, 10 times the official number, may have contracted the new coronavirus, the country’s leading agency for the pandemic said on Tuesday, citing a national study that measures antibodies.
According to official data, India, home to 1.3 billion people, is the second most infected country in the world, with more than 6.1 million cases, only behind the United States. Almost 100,000 Indians have died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
But the true figure could be much higher, according to the latest serosurvey, a study that tests blood for certain antibodies to estimate the proportion of a population that has battled the virus.
“The main findings of this serosurvey are that one in 15 people over the age of 10 has been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in August,” said the director general of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), Balram Bhargava, in a press conference of the ministry of health.
Bhargava said that evidence of exposure to the virus was more prevalent among people tested in urban slums (15.6 percent) and non-slum urban areas (8.2 percent) than in rural areas, where 4.4 percent of those surveyed had antibodies.
Treated with caution
Blood tests were obtained from just over 29,000 people in 21 states or territories between mid-August and mid-September.
The new figures represent a sharp leap from the first results of the sero survey, which according to the ICMR showed that about 0.73 percent of adults in India, about six million people, were infected in May.
Other antibody studies conducted in the capital New Delhi and Mumbai financial center have suggested more infections than official figures indicate.
However, scientists caution that antibody tests should be treated with caution because they also detect exposure to other coronaviruses, not just the one that causes COVID-19, the disease that has killed more than a million people worldwide. since it emerged late last year. .
India, which has one of the world’s worst funded healthcare systems, has gradually lifted a strict lockdown imposed in late March, even as infections rise steadily, to jump-start its ailing economy.
