India’s COVID-19 cases are 20 times more than officially declared
The death toll from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in India will be 959,561 by August 1, 2021, according to latest projection by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). With an estimated global toll of 5,050,464, India would account for nearly a fifth of the total deaths.
IHME is a global health research center at the University of Washington. Its projections on COVID-19 are considered to be based on robust models.
The pandemic already killed 3,104,743 (as of April 26), according to data from the world Health Organization; India accounted for 195,123 of them.
IHME projected India’s daily death toll at 13,050 by May 15 — more than double the current 6,352 deaths (April 27).
There were many more COVID-19 cases in India than Government of India has declared, IHME professor Christopher JL Murray, said in a recorded analysis:
The exponential rise in cases and deaths continues in India, and our analysis of seroprevalence surveys, is telling us what the infection detection rate is below 5 per cent — maybe even around 3-4 per cent. This means that the number of cases that are being detected needs to be multiplied by 20 or more to get the number of infections that are occurring in India. The number of infections right now is extraordinarily large. There’s more infections happening in India than what occurred globally two weeks ago.
That way, India would already have had 6 million infections.
“Our latest projections show that the number of infections driven by the surge in India (and perhaps also driven by the surges in Bangladesh and Pakistan) will be reaching 15 million a day globally,” he said.
Murray argues that infection in India is so high that “COVID-19 may run out of people to infect pretty soon”. This means after mid-May transmission in India would start declining.
That is that proverbial silver lining, but the novel coronavirus has not been confirmed yet to take a chartered path.
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