India Covid cases cross 14 lakh Experts feel official figures low as asymptomatics not counted

India on Sunday surpassed another undesirable milestone of 14-lakh Covid19 cases, by recording more than one lakh additional cases in three days.

The country added 52,961 cases on Sunday, the highest one-day tally so far, taking the total number of cases to 14,36,806 according covid19India.com. Of this, 9,17,234 people have recovered, while 4,84,750 are under treatment.

Experts believe that the official figure on the number of patients is heavily understated as a large number of asymptomatic cases are unnoticed because of dismally low number of tests.

Out of the over 130 crore population, only 1.63 crore or 1.25 per cent of the people have been tested for Coronavirus, though the practice of testing and isolation was considered the only way to stop the march of the deadly disease.

In terms of tests per million, a metric used to compare the performance of different countries, India stands at a lowly 137, by conducting 11,798 tests per million, or 10 lakh cases.

The US, whose President Donald Trump ranked India next to his country in terms of tests, stands at

23. The US has conducted

1,61,185 tests per million — nearly 1.5 lakh per million

more than India.

While Monaco tops the testing metric with 9.73 lakh testing per million, India — called a global economic power and IT superpower — fares worse than abysmally poor countries like Iraq, Rwanda, Nepal, Ghana and Jamaica.

The United Kingdom has conducted 2.14 lakh tests for every million people, which places it in 14th rank. Countries like Australia, Canada, Russia,

Denmark, Mauritius and even the Maldives have conducted over one lakh tests — which is nearly 10 times more than India’s.

In terms of deaths per million, India stands at 91st rank in the descending order. That means there are 123 countries which have lower deaths record than India’s 24 deaths per million.

Countries with fairly higher population density like Indonesia, Bangladesh,

Japan, Sri Lanka, Singapore and African countries have reported lower deaths per million metric.

In terms of cases per million, India fared better than 100 countries while there are 114 countries which performed well in containing the spread of Coronavirus. The website worldometers reports that India has one Covid-19 positive case per 962 people and one death for every 42,089 people.