1 MILLION INFECTIONS

India records over 36k fresh cases and 690 deaths; active cases stand at 343,268 After first million takes 137 days, experts say the next may be recorded in less than a month

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday became only the third country in the world — after the United States and Brazil — to hit a million Covid-19 infections, with 36,247 new cases taking the country’s tally to 1,004,652, and 690 new fatalities putting the disease death toll in the fourand-a-half months of the outbreak at 25,594.

Experts estimate the next million to take less than a month — the doubling rate stands at 20.6 days — and say the focus now needs to shift to rural parts of the country that traditionally have been beyond the reach of adequate health care mechanisms, and where new hot spots are now feared to pop up.

On Thursday, India had 343,268 active cases and the case fatality rate (CFR) — the proportion of people who succumbed to the illness from among known infections — was 2.5%. The US, which has 3,648,250 cases and 140,518 deaths, has a fatality rate of 3.9%; and Brazil, with 1,978,236 cases and 75,697 infections, is at 3.8%.

India’s journey to a million cases took 137 days, and half of these were in a hard nationwide lockdown announced in the early days of the outbreak — a strategy that officials and experts said bought the country precious time to set up isolation centres, add hospital beds and beef up testing infrastructure. With crippling economic costs piling up, the country began unlocking in June, when the outbreak was on a sharp upward trajectory,

In the last week, however,

DEATHS

India has added an average of 30,076 cases a day, up from 23,895 a day in the seven-day period before that. At least two states, Bihar and Assam, announced they will be reimposing lockdowns while Uttar Pradesh — the state with the highest population — said it will follow a weekend shutdown.

At this rate, Covid-19 infections are on track this year to surpass the roughly 2.4 million tuberculosis infections recorded in India in the 12 months of 2019, and lead to a comparable number of deaths. TB, widely regarded as the deadliest infectious disease in India, led to the deaths of around 79,000 people, according to the Union government’s India TB Report 2020.