India’s COVID tally fifth highest in world

India’s COVID tally fifth highest in world

Country overtakes Spain in numbers even as study finds that infectivity rose from lockdown 1.0 to 3.0

07/06/2020, JACOB KOSHY,NEW DELHI

Registering a new high in the number of daily cases detected — 10,313 — India on Saturday overtook Spain to become the country with the fifth highest confirmed COVID-19 infections (2,46,520). The rise in cases comes despite the fact that 1,37,938 samples were tested on Saturday, down from 1,43,661 on Friday, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

The death toll increased by 294 to 6,941, even as the recovery rate remained at close to 48%. Cases have steadily risen, doubling every 17 days, among the fastest in countries with the most infections.

The surge in infections is reflected in a study led by officials at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), a Union Health Ministry body, tasked with disease surveillance.

The study found that India’s reproduction number (R0), or the average number of people a single COVID-positive patient infects, has increased between lockdown 1.0 and the beginning of lockdown 3.0. Moreover, India needs 621 million ‘recoveries’ to achieve ‘herd immunity’ at current rates of disease transmission, said the study that appeared online on June 2 in the peer-reviewed Indian Journal of Public Health (IJPH).

India reported its first 100 cases on March 15, and its effective transmission rate then was 2.51. That means, on average, every two infected persons are infecting five others. However, not everyone spreads the virus equally. Some may have a higher viral load, some a reduced load and yet others may be more mobile and spread it wider than more sedentary persons.

To factor these varying rates of spread, epidemiologists compute reproduction rates in a population as an average. For a pandemic to end, this number must dip below 1.

The initiation of the lockdown reduced the R0, the authors said. “On April 2, eight days after Phase 1 lockdown, the estimated Rt (the R0 at a particular period) decreased to 1.91. At the end of Phase 1 (April 14) and Phase 2 (May 3) of lockdown, Rt was 1.28 and 1.83. As of May 4, 2020, latest Rt of 2.04 was estimated,” the authors said. May 4, or the beginning of lockdown 3.0, saw easing of restrictions in public activity. Since May 4, India’s COVID count has multiplied five-fold as have deaths.