NEW DELHI: An analysis of a data on COVID-19 revealed that the number of cases has spiked nearly 93 times during the lockdown period between March 24 and May 4.
It was on March 24 when India implemented national lockdown for the first time with an aim to curb the number of cases.
A total number of confirmed cases till March 23 was nearly 500 and on May 4 when the lockdown saw relaxation the number rose to 46,437 which is nearly 93 times rise.
The analysis also revealed that countries having a large number of positive cases during mid-March had much slower growth than India during their lockdown tenure.
Italy implemented the lockdown on March 8 when the number was 7375 and by the time restrictions were lifted on May 4 when the number of cases touched the mark of 2,11,938 registering a rise of 29 times.
Likewise, France had 7730 confirmed cases on March 17 when a lockdown was put in place but by May 4, the country had nearly 1,69,462 cases, marking a 22 times rise from the March 17.
Spain had 7988 number of cases on March 15 when the lockdown was implemented but the number increased to 2,48,301 on May 4 when many restrictions were lifted by the authorities. During the period, the positive cases increased by 31 times.
South Korea managed to curb the rise even without a lockdown and the cases could not go beyond 11,000 on May 4.
Data also disclosed that all these countries adopted aggressive testing which doesn’t look feasible in India. While Spain conducted 41,332 tests per million of its population, Italy conducted 38,221 tests. France also went aggressive on testing as it carried out 16,856 tests.
India’s testing has gone up in the last couple of days and was close to 14 lakh-mark by Thursday.
However, it is way behind other countries in conducting tests and has conducted only 984 tests per one million population so far.
