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NEW DELHI: The number of confirmed coronavirus deaths in India exceeded 1,000 on Wednesday (April 29) after its biggest daily increase, but the numbers remain low compared to Europe and the United States in a phenomenon that baffles experts. .
With massive slums and an unstable health system, there was a fear that the pandemic would devastate India and have killed more than 214,000 people worldwide.
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The latest daily figure of 73 deaths was the highest in India, offering a warning that the giant South Asian nation was not yet clear.
Lack of evidence and many other factors mean that India’s official figure of 1,007 deaths could be well below the actual number of coronavirus victims.
“We see low numbers but we don’t know how to validate those numbers or rates,” virologist T. Jacob John told AFP.
“Governments want to report less and … we are blindly looking for true rates and numbers.”
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So far, India appears to have been spared the devastation seen in New York, Milan, and other parts of the world hardest hit, where hospitals have been overwhelmed by coronavirus cases.
Experts have offered a number of theories and factors, but there is still no definitive explanation.
“It may well be true that the trajectory of the Indian epidemic is very different for reasons we do not understand … but those are all the theories at the moment,” Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, told AFP.
One possible factor is that India imposed a blockade on its 1.3 billion people on March 25, when there were 606 confirmed cases and 10 deaths, and it has been rigidly enforced.
The government says the number of infections could have reached 100,000 without it.
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There are also other problems that could also have kept them at risk, including a young population and the possible positive effects of the BCG tuberculosis vaccine, John said.
Another factor could be decades of widespread dengue that provides communities with some “innate immunity,” he speculated.
Still, experts warn that no one has an accurate picture of the pandemic in remote rural villages and slums.
Even in normal times, accurately recording deaths or causes in India can be a difficult task, where many poor people get sick and die without entering the hospital or seeing a doctor.
Just under half of the estimated 10 million annual deaths in the country are not recorded, according to Jha, who leads the Million Death Study that regularly surveys Indian households on the subject.
He said authorities could use the framework of their study to survey households and get an idea of the spread of the pandemic beyond the small test regimen, or find answers to why the coronavirus is not devastating communities.
“A survey likes this, if it showed lower than expected death rates and could get to the cause, it would be important,” he said.
“India needs to count the dead quickly.”
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