COVID-19: Expect a Million Deaths in India by Aug 1

UPDATE: Maharashtra is the worst-hit state followed by Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. According to Reuters, a veteran public health expert warned top Indian officials in early March that a new variant of the coronavirus was spreading quickly in a rural district in the heart of the country and that the outbreak required urgent attention. Federal health authorities failed to respond adequately to that warning, Dr Subhash Salunke, who has 30 years of experience in public health in India, Indonesia and the United States, told Reuters.

The death toll from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in India will be 959,561 by August 1, 2021, according to latest projection by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). With an estimated global toll of 5,050,464, India would account for nearly a fifth of the total deaths.

IHME is a global health research center at the University of Washington. Its projections on COVID-19 are considered to be based on robust models.

The pandemic already killed 3,104,743 as of April 26, according to data from the world Health Organization; India accounted for 195,123 of them.

There were many more COVID-19 cases in India than Government of India has declared, IHME professor Christopher JL Murray, said in a recorded analysis:

“The exponential rise in cases and deaths continues in India, and our analysis of seroprevalence surveys, is telling us what the infection detection rate is below 5 per cent — maybe even around 3-4 per cent. This means that the number of cases that are being detected needs to be multiplied by 20 or more to get the number of infections that are occurring in India. The number of infections right now is extraordinarily large. There’s more infections happening in India than what occurred globally two weeks ago.”

According to McKinsey Global Institute’s latest report, India’s economy has reached a “decisive point“, which requires decisive reforms over the next 12 to 18 months to create jobs for millions of workers between now and 2030. 

That way, India would already have had 6 million infections.

“Our latest projections show that the number of infections driven by the surge in India (and perhaps also driven by the surges in Bangladesh and Pakistan) will be reaching 15 million a day globally,” he said.

Murray argues that infection in India is so high that “COVID-19 may run out of people to infect pretty soon”. This means after mid-May transmission in India would start declining.

That is that proverbial silver lining, but the novel coronavirus has not been confirmed yet to take a chartered path.

Source: DownToEarth