India overtakes Brazil as virus cases accelerate in its rural states
INDIA has overtaken Brazil to record the second-largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases globally.
On Sunday, India became the first nation to record more than 90,000 new daily infections, taking its total cases to more than 4.2 million with 71,642 deaths.
While fatalities still trail the United States and Brazil, they are increasing rapidly, with almost 1,000 deaths announced daily over the past week.
Covid-19 initially spread in India’s cities, but is now taking hold in its rural hinterlands where only 20 per cent of doctors are based.
More than 60 per cent of active cases are in five predominantly rural states – Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.
Dr Yogesh Jain, a public health expert from Chhattisgarh state, said immediate action was necessary.
“As the disease accelerates in rural areas, we risk causing mayhem there,” he said. “We really have to think quickly and add village-level community isolation facilities as home quarantine is not possible for the 69 per cent of our population there.”
Public health experts have attributed India’s Covid-19 surge to mismanagement.
On March 25, Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, announced the country would enter a draconian twomonth lockdown, with citizens only permitted to leave their homes to purchase food and medicines.
However, 90 per cent of Indians are employed informally and rely on daily earnings, without a contract or sick pay. Confined to their homes, up to one quarter of its population found themselves unemployed and its economy shrunk by a record 23.9 per cent from April to June.
Millions of internal migrants, who form the backbone of urban economies, were also stranded in the country’s cities without any method of earning money. In the largest migration since Partition, millions of starving workers attempted to return to their remote towns and villages, taking the deadly virus with them.
An estimated 400 million Indians were pushed further into poverty by the lockdown, according to the International Labour Organisation, meaning it is unlikely to be reimplemented despite surging case numbers, according to Dr Jyoti Joshi, the head of South Asia at the Centre for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy. “The poorest Indian is today caught between the dangerous consequences of contracting Covid-19 when they step out, or the consequences of joblessness and hunger,” said Dr Joshi.
“We have to learn to live with the virus and ready ourselves for a further upward trend in Covid-19 numbers.”
Meanwhile, there are questions over the accurate documentation of fatalities in India, with doctors in some public hospitals under pressure to report comorbidities, rather than Covid, as the cause of death.
One doctor in the western city of Surat told The Daily Telegraph the authorities wanted to keep figures low to avoid public panic.
Public health experts are also warning that India now faces a serious shortage of healthcare professionals over the upcoming months.
‘We have to ready ourselves for a further upward trend in Covid cases’