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NEW DELHI: India’s death toll from COVID-19 rose to more than 100,000 on Saturday (Oct 3), only the third country in the world to reach that grim milestone, after the United States and Brazil, and its epidemic shows no signs of diminishing.
The total deaths rose to 100,842, the Health Ministry said, while the infection count rose to 6.47 million after a daily increase in cases of 79,476. India now has the highest rate of daily increase in infections in the world.
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The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which faces a collapsing economy after imposing a harsh lockdown to try to stop the spread of the virus in late March, is pushing for the country’s full openness.
Cinemas were able to reopen at half capacity this week and authorities may decide to reopen schools from the middle of this month.
Heading into winter and the Christmas season, including the Hindu festival of Diwali next month, the world’s second-most populous country could see an increase in cases, health experts said.
“We’ve seen a recent slowdown of the virus curve, but this may be a local peak, there may be another one coming up,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan.
He said the data showed that just over 7 percent of the 1.3 billion population had been exposed to the virus, meaning India was still far from any kind of herd immunity.
The number of cases could rise to 12.2 million by the end of the year, but the rate of spread would depend on the effectiveness of measures such as social distancing, he said.
“So it will continue as a slow-burning coil, that’s my hope, and we have to play long-term to prevent it from turning into a wildfire.”
DATA ASKED
The United States, Brazil, and India together account for nearly 45 percent of all COVID-19 deaths globally.
However, death rates in India have been significantly lower than in those other two countries, raising questions about the accuracy of their data.
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India has, on average, less than one death from the disease per 10,000 people, while the United States and Brazil have seen six deaths per 10,000.
US President Donald Trump, defending his administration’s handling of the pandemic in this week’s presidential debate, said countries like India were reporting no deaths.
Shashank Tripathi of the Infectious Diseases Research Center at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru acknowledged that there could be problems with the data, although India’s young population could help explain the lower death rate.
“In India, even without a pandemic, not all deaths are recorded correctly,” Tripathi said.
“I’m not really sure the death rates reflect the correct numbers, although the younger demographic has given us some advantage.”
Representatives from the health ministry and the Indian Council for Medical Research did not immediately respond to calls or emails for comment.
Health experts said there could be increased immunity in India due to the high incidence of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. Almost 1,200 people in India die from tuberculosis every day, roughly the same as deaths from COVID-19.
Kamakshi Bhate, emeritus professor of community medicine at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, said she did not expect the death toll in India to rise dramatically even as the virus spreads to dense population groups and across the countryside.
“People expected all the slums to be eliminated, but it wasn’t. We have our own resistance,” he said.
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