Just three weeks after recording one million official cases, India passed the two million reported coronavirus case on Friday, according to the latest official figures from the Indian Ministry of Health. And thus becomes the third country in the world to reach this level after the United States and Brazil.
The South Asian giant, which has 1.3 billion inhabitants, has so far recorded 41,585 deaths from Covid-19 disease for a total of 2,027,074 confirmed patients since the start of the epidemic.
Poor screening and imperfect censuses
With Indian authorities only testing symptomatic patients, experts say the numbers are underestimated. The actual numbers for the epidemic could be significantly higher due to low screening given the sheer size of India's population and an imperfect death toll.
In July, an antibody detection study estimated that around a quarter of the population of the capital New Delhi has already had the virus, 40 times more than official figures. Another study estimated that half of the inhabitants of Bombay's slums have contracted the new coronavirus, again a much higher proportion than the authorities' toll.
Ostracism
India has tested about 16,500 people per million population, compared to 190,000 in the United States, according to the statistics site Worldometer.
Discrimination associated with the virus can also deter Indians from getting tested. The authorities are putting up posters in front of the homes of people who test positive, to warn of the presence of a patient with the virus in the premises. “There is as much a fear of disease as it is of ostracism and quarantine,” says health expert Preeti Kumar.
Local reconfigurations
India introduced a brutal national lockdown at the end of March, which it lifted in early June in an attempt to revive a bloodless economy. However, numerous restrictions and quarantine measures between different Indian states remain in place.
Local authorities have imposed in recent weeks local reconfinements in states such as Bihar (north) or Tamil Nadu (south), or in the metropolitan area of the large city of Bengalore (south), headquarters of high-tech Indian.
Towards less dense regions
While the novel coronavirus epidemic in India previously had the mega-cities of New Delhi and Bombay as its main epicenters, the Covid-19 disease is now starting to flare up in less dense and more widespread regions.
According to health expert Preeti Kumar, the likely reason for the resurgence of cases outside major cities is the return of migrant workers to their homes. Millions of them found themselves unemployed when a brutal national lockdown was imposed in India at the end of March.
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