With four consecutive days of record highs in new cases of coronovirus disease (Kovid-19), India went into total infections in Russia on Sunday, becoming the third largest hot spot for the virus, ranking behind only the US and Brazil .
There were 24,422 new cases and 421 new deaths in the country on Sunday, of which the total number of infections was 697,284 and 19,700 people lost their lives.
With nearly three million cases and 132,000 deaths, the United States is the most affected country in the world, followed by Brazil, with approximately 1.6 million cases and more than 64,000 deaths. Russia, ranked fourth, now has 681,251 Kovid-19 infections and 10,161 deaths. Peru was ranked fifth on Sunday night with over 299,000 cases and 10,000 deaths.
Public health experts say that while India has a high covid-19 casiolad, its case fatality rate is 2.8%, much lower than the global average of 4.7%.
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Another statistic that offers hope is that 424,596 patients, or 60.9%, have recovered from the disease — better than the global recovery rate of 56.6%. The recovery rate in India has been climbing steadily — it was 48% a month ago and 28.5% 30 days before that. This means that 36.4% of the total case count is currently “active”. Active cases are a crucial metric because they directly influence the patient load faced by the country’s health care infrastructure.
The three worst-hit states – Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Delhi – account for more than 60% of all cases recorded in the country, indicating how the virus has created urban hot spots of the infection. Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai have remained the cities with the highest numbers of infections, with 99,444, 84,524 and 68,254 confirmed Covid-19 cases (36.2% of the national tally) as of Sunday. Nearly 85% of all cases in the country can be traced to the 10 worst-affected states.
New Covid-19 cases have dropped substantially in China, the country where the pandemic originated, but surged in India and ravaged South America. Experts say that in countries with weak health care systems and impoverished populations, fighting the virus has proven to be difficult.
Latin America has become the latest epicentre of the highly contagious disease, with Brazil and Mexico both reporting massive spike in cases over the past month.
n India, the latest 100,000 infections were recorded in just five days. India recorded its first 50,000 Covid-19 cases in nearly 67 days, with a wave of infections beginning in March after three isolated cases were first reported in Kerala in January.
The disease’s doubling rate, which is defined as the average period it takes for a twofold rise, is 20.3 days.
Across the world, many governments are easing restrictions as they face political and economic challenges triggered by the pandemic. So far, the disease has killed at least 535,000 people worldwide and infected more than 11.4 million.
Concerns are growing in India, where new cases showed another record surge on Sunday, overtaking 21,000 for the fourth straight day amid restrictions on travel and business activity. In recent times states with relatively few cases have been seen as residents, with migrant workers traveling on special trains returning to the homes of residents. India has reported an average of 22,377 cases in the last five days.
Delhi reported 2,244 new cases on Sunday, taking the total infection to 99,444. A total of 3,067 people in the capital have died of the disease so far. The number of daily cases in Delhi is less than 3,000 for the last nine days, with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal saying that the situation was controlled by the joint efforts of his government and the Center.
While at the national level the new cases have risen by 3.5% on average over the past week, two states — Karnataka and Telangana — have shown nearly double the rate of increase in the same period. Though still considerably behind the “big three” in terms of total cases, Karnataka and Telangana have been climbing the national tally steadily, reporting the highest single-day cases outside the “big three” every day over the last week.
India broke into the top three hot spots of the infectious disease on a day the country completed testing 10 million samples for Covid-19, with more than 230,000 being tested every day on average over the last week. This places India on the fifth spot in the world in absolute numbers of tests — behind China, the US, Russia and the UK. However, once the population of the country is factored in, India drops to the 135th position globally, with over 7,500 tests conducted for every million residents of the country.
However, experts say that how a country performs against epidemics is a more effective indicator of death. “Case count is not a reliable indicator because there are too many variables. The tests found depend on the number of trials, type of test and false positives and false negatives associated with it, the test criterion (who is eligible, who is not), and repeat the test. Given the fact that test rates vary each day and the numbers are not standardized, daily deaths are a more stable indicator of whether there is a drop in the epidemic, ”Dr. Shrinath K. Reddy, President, Public Health Foundation of India said.
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“Since deaths lag behind cases for 10–20 days, the decline in daily deaths over 10 consecutive days is a more stable indicator of the decline in new cases. Europe did not talk about the calculation of the case, they began to come down by daily death. Italy, Spain and France all did so. But you need more deaths and deaths per million to assess the overall impact of the epidemic after it is over.
