India's coronavirus death toll passes 500,000
India’s official death toll from Covid-19 has passed 500,000, even as many experts flag underreporting of cases across the country.
The daily update from the country’s federal health ministry on Friday showed the number of deaths reaching 500,055, up 1,072 in the previous 24 hours. Total infections stood at 41.9 million, according to the statistics, second only to the US.
Case numbers have jumped in recent weeks owing to the highly infectious Omicron variant but rates have slowed in recent days and the health ministry last week said there were indications of a plateau in virus cases in several parts of the country.
Experts said the Omicron wave would not cause many deaths or hospitalisations, but several states imposed restrictions on movement and have only now started easing them.
Many analysts believe India actually reached 500,000 deaths last year when it was hit by a devastating rise in Delta variant cases that brought its health care system close to collapse. The wave caused at least 200,000 deaths as hospitals ran out of oxygen and patients scrambled desperately to source medicines.
A study by a US research group last year suggested that between 3.4 million and 4.7 million people had died.
For months, several states have been reconciling their death tolls and adding “backlog” deaths as India’s supreme court ordered state authorities to provide compensation to families. Kerala, Bihar and Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat are among those to have added thousands of old deaths to their existing tolls.
Last month, the Modi government asked states to stop mandatory testing of contacts of those who tested positive, unless they had underlying health conditions. But soon after the order the
government told states to ramp up testing as numbers dropped.
Booming sales of home coronavirus self-test kits have also fuelled fears of underreporting of cases across the country.