New Delhi: In June, after the first two rounds of lockdown in India had ended, the country was recording 10,000 cases of Covid-19. After that, the graph rose up till mid-September when cases peaked in the country with almost 1 lakh cases recorded every day. Since then, the Covid graph in India has been declining.
In episode 635 of ‘Cut The Clutter’, ThePrint’s Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta talks about India’s current Covid situation.
On 8 December, India recorded 26,567 cases — a quarter of the cases recorded in mid-September.
“India is still testing upwards of a million a day. And at this point, many more RT-PCR tests are being done than they were in September, when a much larger percentage was rapid antigen tests,” he said.
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Active cases
Gupta focused only on active cases, noting that these cases mattered because they highlighted the number of people who are currently sick and the pressure on the health system.
India crossed 1 lakh active Covid cases on 2 June and by mid-September it had crossed 10 lakh. This became a point of worry as festival season was coming, people were getting tired and states were unlocking.
However, the graph still continued to decline. Today, India has about 3,84,00 active Covid cases — just a little over one-third of the cases in mid-September, noted Gupta.
The number of people who have recovered has been more than the number of positive cases for the past few weeks, discounting Sunday. The last time India had 3,84,000 active cases was on 24 July.
Also read: India sees lowest positivity rate of 2.5% since June & least daily Covid cases in 5 months
Deaths and testing
By 9 June. India was recording around 250 daily deaths, which peaked in September-end at 1,200. This was followed by a decline with 385 deaths recorded on 8 December. The last time India recorded this number in daily deaths was on 19 June.
“It was a big complaint earlier that India wasn’t testing very much. On 9 June, thereabouts, India crossed the first sort of threshold of 1.5 lakh tests a day. Between 27 and 30 September, India really upped its testing numbers,” Gupta said.
More than 10 million tests have been held in India since the beginning of the pandemic.
India’s test positivity rate — the percentage of people who test positive — peaked in mid July at 16 per cent.
Gupta said, “The WHO yardsticks tell us that if the TPR or test positivity rate is more than 8 per cent, then we are testing too little, which means we have to test more and more, until our TPR goes below that threshold.” As of 8 December, it is down to 2.5 per cent.
Similarly, in March-April, India’s case fatality rate was upwards 3-4 per cent. In the last three months it has been between 1.9 per cent and 1.45 per cent.
In the midst of all this, developed countries like the US, Germany and the UK have fared poorly compared to India, despite low populations and better healthcare facilities.
Gupta cited an article by epidemiologist Dr Devi Sridhar to explain this phenomenon, where she talked about how this virus does not follow any broad pattern.
“That’s why it is almost impossible for the world, for a global organisation, and even for a country the size of India, to decide one approach to dealing with it,” Gupta said.
In addition to India recording the lowest number of new cases since July, there is also other positive news about the virus.
A 90-year-old Irish woman became the first person in the world to get a Covid vaccine shot. Furthermore, two companies, US-based Pfizer and the Serum Institute of India, have applied for emergency use authorisation of vaccines here.
“You are seeing light at the end of the tunnel. That tunnel may be 100 days away, but these are very crucial 100 days. So dodge the bullet for these 100 days and make sure we do not turn this car back again,” Gupta concluded.
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