NEW DELHI, April 29, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – India’s confirmed coronavirus death
toll passed 1,000 on Wednesday following its highest daily increase, but the
numbers remain low compared with Europe and the United States in a phenomenon
that is puzzling experts.
With massive slums and a shaky healthcare system, there were fears India
would be ravaged by the pandemic that has killed more than 214,000 people
worldwide.
The latest daily toll of 73 deaths was India’s highest, offering a warning
that the giant South Asian nation was not yet in the clear.
A lack of testing and many other factors mean that India’s official toll
of 1,007 deaths could be far below the real number of coronavirus victims.
“We see low numbers but we do not know how to validate those numbers or
rates,” virologist T. Jacob John told AFP.
“Governments desire under-reporting and… we are flying blind for true
rates and numbers.”
India appears so far to have been spared the devastation seen in New York,
Milan and other hard-hit parts of the world, where hospitals have been
overwhelmed by cases of coronavirus.
Experts have offered a number of theories and factors, but there is no
definitive explanation yet.
“It might well be true that the trajectory of the Indian epidemic is very
different for reasons that we do not understand… but those are all theories
right now,” Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, told
AFP.
One possible factor is that India imposed a lockdown on its 1.3 billion
people on March 25, when there were 606 confirmed cases and 10 deaths, and it
has been rigidly enforced.
The government says the number of infections could have reached 100,000
without it.
There are also other issues that could also have kept the risk low —
including a young population and the possible positive effects of the BCG
tuberculosis vaccine, said John.
Another factor could be decades of widespread dengue fever providing
communities with some “innate immunity”, he speculated.
Still, experts caution that no-one has an accurate picture of the pandemic
in remote rural villages and deep in slums.
Even in normal times, accurately recording deaths or causes in India can
be a difficult task, where many poor people fall sick and die without
entering a hospital or seeing a doctor.
Just under half of the country’s estimated 10 million annual deaths are
not recorded, according to Jha, who leads the Million Death Study that
regularly surveys Indian households on the issue.
He said authorities could use his study’s framework to survey households
and get a sense of the pandemic’s spread beyond the small testing regime, or
find answers to why the coronavirus is not devastating communities.
“A survey likes this, if it showed lower death rates than expected and was
able to get at the cause, would be important,” he said.
“India needs to count the dead, quickly.”