In what can be termed as a very depressing news, the number of coronavirus disease Covid-19 cases, in India surpassed 200,000 yeterday, nearly doubling over 15 days, even as a considerable reopening of national transport and business activity fuelled fears of localised outbreaks emerging in new areas beyond urban hot spots that have so far pushed the contagion.
Talking about the global perspective, there are now 6.4 million infections of Sars-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, and close to 380,000 deaths. In India, the number of fatalities yesterday was 5,753. The case fatality rate (CFR) in India, however, stood at 2.8%, lower than the worldwide figure of 5.9%. About a fourth of India’s total infections have been reported over the past week.
Official data from states clearly pinpoints that 100,289 patients have so far recuperated from the disease in the country, taking the recovery rate to 48.4%, which is among the most promising figures on the infection across the world. The low CFR and high recovery rate indicate that India may not be witnessing an impact as severe as in some of the other countries ravaged by the pathogen.
While experts keep on highlighting the fact that the peak of the outbreak is yet to come, an analysis on preprint server medRxiv showed that there could be independent regional crests across the vast geography of the country at different points in time. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said India was “far away from the peak”.
