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RAJEWADI, India: The picturesque sugarcane-producing town of Rajewadi in western India did not have a single confirmed case of coronavirus until mid-August. Now one in four people tests positive for the virus, and police blame a local religious event for the spread.
Such outbreaks in cases in small towns and villages, where the wearing of masks and social distancing have all but disappeared and community gatherings have returned, explain why infections in India are increasing faster than anywhere else in the world and why that the country will soon reach 4 million. cases.
Based on current trends, India will overtake Brazil as the second worst affected nation after the United States in days.
The South Asian country reported 83,883 new infections on Thursday, beating its previous world record for the highest increase in a single day. Cases are accelerating in their towns, villages and smaller cities, while the situation has stabilized in the large metropolises of New Delhi and Mumbai.
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The World Health Organization has said that India’s relatively low death rate could rise as the virus spreads to the vast countryside, where health facilities are basic at best.
In Rajewadi, a small village of about 360 people in Maharashtra, India’s hardest-hit state, authorities launched widespread tests only after an elderly resident was found to have died of COVID-19 on Aug. 17, he said. Aniruddha Athalye, a senior health official in Satara. district where the town is located.
Since then, 91 people have tested positive and the village has been sealed off by the police.
Government officials, police and residents said that days before the death, the village’s only fatality from the disease, the person and 30 other people had gathered one night to offer prayers to a local deity. They had dinner together after the rituals and during the entire performance no one wore masks or practiced social distancing.
Police said nearly everyone who attended tested positive. Police have filed a complaint against the organizer for violating the state’s epidemic law.
One person who saw the show but did not attend said that “everyone was behaving as if the coronavirus did not infect them.” He declined to be identified while police investigated the case.
The village is now entrenched with bamboo and wood, with a sign describing it as a containment zone.
Sanjay Bhosale, a grocery store owner whose son has contracted the virus, said residents grew weary of the virus rules and started visiting like before.
“The perception was created that the coronavirus was just an exaggeration, that it is not that serious,” Bhosale said.
“Normal life had resumed for us. Only after the person died did people take it seriously again, but by then the virus had spread throughout the town. Now we are taking precautions.”
INCREASE THE TESTS
This trend has manifested itself throughout the countryside of India, where 60 percent of its 1.35 billion people live.
As more cases are reported based on higher evidence, some states like Assam in the northeast have asked police to toughen the enforcement of social distancing and other restrictions. Assam, largely rural, has reported one of the highest infection totals in India.
In Satara, total cases doubled between August 6 and 23, a period in which India added 1 million new infections, the fastest jump in the world.
Officials warn that the situation will get worse before it improves.
“In April and May, people were following all the rules, but now the mindset has changed. They have become casual and are taking the coronavirus lightly,” Satara civil surgeon Subhash Chavan said.
Satara now performs more than 2,000 tests a day, up from just about 200 weeks. Nationwide, India’s tests have more than doubled in a month to more than 1 million per day. That works out to about 32 tests per 1,000 people, higher than in many developing countries but much lower than the US rate of 253 per 1,000.
Authorities say that because India’s rural health infrastructure is poor, the focus is on testing so that patients can isolate themselves earlier at home, reserving the few hospital beds for the most critical. Already in rural Maharashtra, both public and private hospitals are running out of beds, authorities say.
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Still, only 1.76 percent of confirmed patients have died in India, compared to the global case fatality rate of 3.3 percent.
Faced with the worst economic recession in its history, India is moving to ease lockdown restrictions, despite rising infections. India is set to resume urban subway trains and allow up to 100 people to gather for religious, political and other events from the end of this month.
“We have to take the economic angle into consideration when facing the pandemic,” said Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam’s Minister of Health and Finance. “Instead of frequent crashes, we should try to maintain social distancing and wear masks to contain the virus.”
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