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NEW DELHI: More than 60 million people in India, 10 times the official figure, may have contracted the new coronavirus, the country’s leading agency against the pandemic said on Tuesday (September 29), citing a national study measuring antibodies. .
India, home to 1.3 billion people, is the second most infected country in the world, with more than 6.2 million cases, behind only the United States.
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.
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“The main findings of this sero-survey are that one in 15 people over the age of 10 has been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in August,” said Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) Director General Balram Bhargava in a ministry of health. Press conference.
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 percent of those surveyed had antibodies.
Blood tests were obtained from just over 29,000 people in 21 states or territories between mid-August and mid-September.
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The new figures represent a sharp leap from the results of the first sero-survey, which according to the ICMR showed that around 0.73 percent of adults in India, some 6 million people, were infected in May.
Other antibody studies conducted in the capital New Delhi and the financial center of Mumbai 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 1 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.
The country’s COVID-19 case count rose to 6.23 million after it reported 80,472 new infections in the past 24 hours, data from the Health Ministry showed on Wednesday.
Deaths from coronavirus infections increased by 1,179 in the past 24 hours to 97,497, the ministry said.
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