Glimmer of hope, but India’s virus crisis is not over yet
For the first time in months, Izhaar Hussain Shaikh is feeling somewhat optimistic.
The 30-year-old ambulance driver in Mumbai has been working tirelessly ever since the city became the epicentre of another catastrophic Covid-19 surge. Last month, he drove about 70 patients to the hospital, his cellphone constantly ringing.
But two weeks into May, he’s only carried 10 patients. Cases are falling and so are the phone calls.
“We used to be so busy before, we didn’t even have time to eat,” he said.
In the past week, the number of new cases plunged by nearly 70 per cent in India’s financial capital, home to 22 million people. After a peak of 11,000 daily cases, the city is now seeing fewer than 2000 a day.
The turnaround represents a glimmer of hope for India, still in the clutches of a devastating coronavirus surge that has raised public anger at the Government.
A well-enforced lockdown and vigilant authorities are being credited for Mumbai’s burgeoning success. Even the capital of New Delhi is seeing faint signs of improvement as infections slacken after weeks of tragedy and desperation playing out in overcrowded hospitals and crematoriums, and on the streets.
With more than 24 million confirmed cases and 270,000 deaths, India’s caseload is the second highest after the United States. But experts believe that the country’s steeply rising curve may finally be flattening — even if the plateau is a high one, with an average of 340,000 confirmed daily cases last week. Yesterday, reported infections continued to decline as cases dipped below 300,000 for the first time in weeks.
It is still too early to say things are improving, with Mumbai and New Delhi representing only a sliver of the overall situation. For one, drops in the national caseload largely reflect falling infections in a handful of states with big populations and/or high rates of testing. So the nationwide trends represent an incomplete and misleading picture of how things are faring across India, experts say. And, with active cases over 3.6 million, hospitals are still swamped by patients.
Experts also warn that the virus has outrun India’s testing capabilities.
As the virus jumps from cities to towns to villages, testing has struggled to keep pace, stirring fears that a rural surge is unfurling even as data lags far behind.
Even in big cities, testing has become increasingly harder to access. Labs are inundated and results are taking days, leading many to start treating symptoms before confirming a coronavirus infection. In the last month, cases have more than tripled and reported deaths have gone up six times — but testing has only increased by 1.6 times, said Bhramar Mukherjee, a University of Michigan biostatistician. Meanwhile, vaccinations have plummeted by 40 per cent.
One of the biggest concerns for experts is that India may never know the full death toll from the virus, with fatalities undercounted on such a scale that reporters are finding more answers at crematoriums than official state tallies.