NEW DELHI: India on Friday reached a grim milestone of 1 million documented Covid-19 cases and more alarmingly, non-metropolitan cities with inadequate health infrastructure now seem to be emerging as new hotspots.
The figures by the Centre shows that the number of active cases are rising sharply in Karnataka, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam, and Telangana.
Overall, the country added 34,956 new cases in the last 24 hours, taking the total count to 1,003,832, according to the official figures on Thursday morning. This includes 6,35,757 recoveries and 25,602 people who have succumbed to the infection. Over the last 24 hours, 22,942 patients recovered and 687 died.
Karnataka with 30,661 fresh cases now has the third-highest active caseload in the country after Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu while Andhra Pradesh too with 18,159 cases has overtaken Delhi which has 17,407 active cases.
Experts point out that as states and towns with poorer healthcare facilities reporting higher caseloads, testing - the crucial tool to fight the pandemic which has been India’s Achilles heel since the beginning - needs to be sharpened urgently.
Even though the country has now tested over 1.3 crore samples with daily testing capacity reaching above 3.2 lakh for the last several days, India’s testing rate is lower than countries such as the USA, Brazil, or the UK.
An important way to gauge whether enough tests are being carried out is the testing positivity rate which indicates how many per 100 tested were diagnosed with the disease. The lower it is, the better. On Thursday, the test positivity rate in India was above 10 per cent while the overall TPR for the country is 7.7 percent. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends this rate to be under 5 in order to flatten the curve.
In eight major states - Telangana, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, West Bengal, Gujarat, and Haryana - this rate is also worryingly high.
Specialists say that the only way to stay ahead in the pandemic and save lives is to test more and quickly identify cases that are driving it and also provide immediate medical care to those who need it.
“We have a million documented Covid infections but sadly, that’s the tip of the iceberg. We probably have the highest number of cases in the world, running into crores,” said researcher and chairman of Medanta Liver Institute Dr. Arvinder Singh Soin, who is leading a multi-centric trial on experimental Covid-19 drug tocilizumab.
“This would be obvious if we tested as much as the USA who are testing 15 times more than us.”
Virologist Dr. Shahid Jameel said that while million is just another number, what is important is to do everything to slow down the outbreak which is adding over 30,000 confirmed cases every day or growing above 3 percent daily.
He also emphasised the lack of clear treatment protocol for the disease. “With a couple of drugs now available and with the experience of a million cases, we should have clear treatment protocols based on the stage of the disease. This will keep our hospitals available to the most serious patients and will save lives.”
Public health expert Dr. Oommen John stressed that in terms of public health response contact tracing needs to be strengthened.
“Also, with a million cases India should be at the forefront of generating clinical evidence and contributing to the understanding of pathophysiology,” he said.
There seems to be some silver lining under the Covid cloud too. “The good news is that the fatality rate is falling,” said Dr. Soin. “The hospital and ICU recovery rate has improved in India and elsewhere. There could be two reasons behind this - we have become better at treating Covid, and the virulence of the virus seems to be decreasing.”