News: Is India really among the worst affected by Covid-19?-18-07-2020
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/a-million-cases-but-just-how-badly-affected-is-india/story-NPC6mFZdYu7aCcGYosLfyO.html
That’s a tough question. The simple answer would be: we don’t really know. For a detailed answer, read on.
India is now the third country in the world to have more than a million confirmed Covid-19 cases. The US was the first to cross this mark on April 28. It took 49 days for the number of cases in the United States to increase from 1,000 to a million. Brazil was the second country to cross the one million mark on June 19 -- 91 days after it touched 1,000 confirmed cases. It took comparatively longer for India, about 110 days, to go from 1,000 confirmed cases to a million. India is now at the third place in the world in terms of the number of confirmed cases. It was at the 38th place on March 1, 35th place on April 1, 16th place on May 1, and seventh place on June 1.
India is the second largest country in the world by population, with a population of at least 1.3 billion, and the caseload of a million means that only about 0.07% of the country’s population has been infected with the coronavirus. This is the lowest share of infected population among the five countries with the highest number of confirmed cases and also in comparison to three European countries that were initially very badly affected – Italy, Germany and France.
In the United States, which has nearly 3.7 million confirmed cases, and a population of 328 million, about 1.13% of the population has been infected by the coronavirus. To be sure, the actual share of the infected population could be much higher because not everyone is tested. This brings us to another aspect of the pandemic: testing.
India has conducted about 13.1 million tests, which is second to only the United States and Russia, but when the population is accounted for, India fares worse. India has conducted 9,567 tests per million people, much less compared to the eight countries mentioned above. The United States has conducted 139,455 tests per million people. The positivity rate (number of people found infected as a share of the total number of tests conducted) is almost similar for both the US and India, 8.1% and 7.7%, respectively. A simple extrapolation of this figure would mean that if India tests a greater number of people, say as much as the US has tested, it will find a similarly greater share of infected people in the population. But this again would vary with testing strategies, which makes it difficult to say whether both the countries are equally badly affected.
Another figure that makes India an outlier is the case fatality rate (share of the cumulative number of infected persons who have died among the total cumulative number of persons ever found infected). More than 25,000 people have died in India due to Covid-19 out of more than one million cases detected thus far, which puts India’s case-fatality rate at 2.5%, more than only Russia among the eight countries mentioned above. It is also much lower than the case-fatality rate in Italy, France and Spain, where this is in excess of 9%. But this again does not necessarily mean that the virus in India is less fatal compared to these European countries. Partha Mukhopadhyay, in an article on the Hindustan Times on June 11, argued that India’s total case fatality rate is low compared to Italy mainly because an average infected person in India is younger than an average infected person in Italy. Younger people are less likely to develop severe symptoms or die of the infection compared to elderly and those with comorbidities.
