New Delhi
The coronavirus death toll in India has topped 100,000 seven months since the first batch of virus cases emerged in one of the world’s most populous countries.
As reported by Indian media, India has become the third country in the world to surge past the grim milestone. Only the United States with 212,000 deaths and Brazil with 144,000 dead have reported more fatalities.
In terms of infections, India has recorded 6.47 million cases and is now on its way to overtake the US in the coming weeks as the country with the most infections.
Its 1.3 billion population, which is around four times larger than that of the United States, has seen more than twice as many deaths, raising doubts about India’s official numbers.
“We do not know the reliability of death rates in India,” virologist T. Jacob John told AFP. “India does not have a public health surveillance system documenting real-time disease events and deaths,” he said. Even though India is carrying out around one million tests per day, as a percentage of the population its testing rate is much lower as compared to many other countries across the world.
As of Friday night, of the 6.47 million people infected in the country, 100,896 have lost their lives and over 5.42 million have recovered. The death toll is, however, expected to keep rising as the country is still adding 81,431 new cases a day on average, and of those around 1.5% (based on India’s CFR) will succumb to the diseases.
Government experts have credited India’s relatively better Covid-19 mortality rate to a series of factors such as the experience in dealing with other lung diseases such as tuberculosis, and early interventions in terms of the nationwide lockdown. “These things were crucial in identifying the infected, and isolating them as per requirement very early on in the disease stage,” said Dr Samiran Panda, head, epidemiology and communicable diseases, India Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
Independent experts said the country’s relatively younger population may have also helped in reducing mortality. “Fewer people dying in India of Covid is not surprising as the severity of infection is low in the country, which among other factors can be attributed to better immunity status to fight any infections, and also relatively younger population with fewer comorbidities,” said Dr NK Mehra, former head, transplant, immunology and immunogenetics, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi.
The fact that the outbreak in India started relatively later than it did in the western world may have also worked to India’s advantage on the CFR front. This becomes particularly evident because as the disease has progressed, scientists and doctors have learnt to fight and treat it better. As the result, the CFR has been improving, both in India and the rest of the world. India’s CFR has halved since the start of July – it was 3% on July 1.
“We obviously know the disease far better now, and manage to save most of the hospitalised patients. The mortality rate is under 2%, which is decent if you compare with other countries,” said Dr GC Khilnani, former head, department of pulmonology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi.
The share of deaths among the states, however, has largely been uneven, with Maharashtra (37,480 deaths till Friday) accounting for 37% of all fatalities in the country. It is followed by Tamil Nadu with 9,653 deaths and Karnataka with 9,119 people killed.—AFP
