India’s Covid deaths cross 5,000, but rate lower than elsewhere

At 79 days, India took longer than the worst-affected countries to record 5,000 deaths from Covid-19

nNEWDELHI: The number of deaths due to the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in India crossed the 5,000 mark on Saturday, reaching a grim milestone, but with a fatality rate, which at 2.8% is much lower than the global 6%, there is hope that the outbreak in the country may not be as deadly as it has been in many countries, perhaps highlighting some of the gains from the nationwide lockdown. Meanwhile, the recovery rate in India improved to 47% on Saturday, up 5 percentage points from just a week ago.

The country’s top experts said keeping fatalities down by focussing on health care facilities will now be the most crucial strategy to deal with the pandemic across the country, where the outbreak has largely taken hold and a rise in the number of infections is inevitable.

According to a compilation of data reported by state governments, there have been 181,791 infections and 5,106 fatalities in the country as of Saturday. India took 79 days to record these many deaths, while some of the major Covid-19 hotspot – such United States, United Kingdom, Spain and Italy – took less than a third of this duration to rack up similar counts.

“My concern is more about mortality than the cases. Our population is such that we will have more cases than other coun

Germany

nNo of days to reach 5000th death

Spain

UK

Italy

US

Brazil

France

INDIA

Russia and Turkey, which are among the top 10 most affected nations, have not recorded 5,000 deaths yet

NEWDELHI: Delhi reported over 1,000 cases of Covid-19 for the third day in a row. On Saturday, 1,163 cases were recorded, taking the total number of cases in the city to 18,549.

Cases at the time of 5000th death

At the current pace, the city is likely to cross the 20,000-mark by Monday.

With the sharp increase in the number of cases over the last three days, the number of active Covid-19 cases has gone over 10,000 for the first time. It was 10,058 on Saturday.