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NEW DELHI: Total coronavirus cases in India topped 5 million on Wednesday (Sept. 16), data from the Health Ministry showed, as the pandemic extends its grip over the vast country at an increasingly rapid pace.
With its last 1 million cases recorded in just 11 days, a world record, India now has 5.02 million infections. Only the United States has more, with 6.59 million.
India has been posting the biggest daily jumps in cases for some time, and on Wednesday, the increase was just over 90,000 with a record 1,290 deaths.
While India took 167 days to reach 1 million cases, the next million arrived in just 21 days, faster than the United States and Brazil, according to the Times of India.
Just 29 days later, India became the third country after the United States and Brazil to record 4 million infections. India switched to Brazil earlier this month.
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Even so, and now that India tests around a million people a day, many experts say that this is not enough and that the true number of infections may be much higher.
This has been confirmed in several studies conducted in recent weeks measuring antibodies to the virus among crowded populations in the megacities of New Delhi and Mumbai.
The Indian Council for Medical Research, the country’s leading agency against the pandemic, said last week that its survey had suggested that as early as May, 6.5 million people were infected.
The same is true of deaths, 82,066 as of Wednesday, less than half the 195,000 figure in the United States, and many deaths not properly recorded by authorities even in normal times.
“INCORRECT SIGNAL”
India has one of the worst funded healthcare systems in the world and the nation of 1.3 billion is home to some of the most densely populated cities and towns.
The sharp increase in cases comes despite the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposing one of the tightest closures in the world in late March, leaving tens of millions of people in the informal labor market without work almost overnight. in the morning.
The shutdown saw complete travel bans, business and factory closures, and millions of poor migrant workers fleeing from big cities to their villages, which experts say caused the virus to spread from urban centers to small towns. .
India’s GDP plummeted nearly 24 percent in the first quarter, one of the steepest declines among the major economies.
READ: COVID-19 restrictions threaten Asia’s economic recovery in 2021: Asian Development Bank
The lockdown has been steadily eased even as infections rise, and schools will open for some classes on Monday, along with the tourist hotspot, the Taj Mahal.
“Initially there was quite a rigor in the confinement, but then there was some relaxation before it was fully lifted,” K Srinath Reddy, director of the health charity of the Public Health Foundation of India, told AFP.
“It sent the wrong signal to people that we possibly have things reasonably under control and now the economy takes precedence. The virus is now infecting more people and penetrating deeper into smaller towns.”
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