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India’s Hit Over 100,000 Deaths In Coronavirus With No Signs Of Slowing

Source: Global News

India’s loss of life from the novel coronavirus rose past 100,000 on Saturday, just the third nation in the world to reach that bleak milestone, after the United States and Brazil, and its epidemic gives no indication of abating.

Total deaths rose to 100,842, the health ministry said, while the tally of infections moved to 6.47 million after a day by day increase in cases of 79,476. India presently has the most noteworthy pace of every day increase in diseases in the world.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, confronted with a collapsing economy after imposing a tough lockdown to attempt to stem the spread of the infection in late March, is pushing ahead with a full opening of the country.

Films were permitted to re-open at half capacity this week and authorities can decide to re-open schools from the middle of this current month.

Heading into winter and the holiday season, including the Hindu festival of Diwali one month from now, the world’s second-most crowded country could see a jump in cases, health specialists said.

“We have seen some recent slowdown of the infection curve however this might be a local peak, there may be another coming,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan.

She said data indicated a little over 7% of the population of 1.3 billion had been exposed to the infection, which means India was still far from such a herd immunity.

The number of cases could rise to 12.2 million by the end of the year but the rate of spread would depend on how effective measures, for example, social distancing were, she said.

“So it will proceed like a slow burning coil, that is my hope, and we need to play the long game to stop it from being a wildfire.”

Data Questioned

The United States, Brazil, and India together record for almost 45% of all COVID-19 deaths around the world.

Death rates in India, however, have been significantly lower than in those other two nations, raising questions about the accuracy of its data.

All things considered, short of what one demise from the infection for each 10,000 individuals while the United States and Brazil have seen six deaths per 10,000.

U.S. President Donald Trump, defending his administration’s handling of the pandemic in the current week’s presidential discussion, said nations, for example, India were under-reporting deaths.

Shashank Tripathi, of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, acknowledged there could be issues with the data through India’s young population may help explain the lower death rate.

“In India, even without a pandemic, all deaths are not properly registered,” Tripathi said.

“I’m not very confident that the mortality rates reflect the correct numbers, however the younger demographic has given us some advantage.”

Representatives of the health ministry and the Indian Council of Medical Research didn’t promptly react to calls or emails for comment.

Health experts said there could be greater immunity in India because of the high incidence of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. Nearly 1,200 people in India die of TB every day, roughly the same as deaths from COVID-19.

Kamakshi Bhate, professor emeritus of community medication at the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, said she didn’t expect India’s death toll to surge drastically even as the infection spreads into dense population clusters and over the countryside.

“People were expecting that whole slums would get wiped out yet it didn’t happen that way. We have our own resistance,” she said.

This news is originally posted on globalnews

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