China News Service, September 25. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Chinese website, India's new crown virus epidemic continues to raging, and the number of confirmed cases is rapidly approaching the United States, which has the largest number of cases in the world.
The epidemic situation on the ground may be worse than imagined.
Confirmed cases approach the U.S.
According to the article, India recently exposed the news that a senior government official was infected with new coronary pneumonia, and this time it was fatal: On September 23 local time, the State Minister of the Ministry of Railways of India, Suresh Angadi, was not rescued because of the new crown pneumonia Passed away.
On September 21, local time, the Taj Mahal in India reopened to the public, symbolizing that everything was back to normal.
In fact, the new crown epidemic in India is still very serious.
The picture shows the do not touch sign posted on the railing.
As early as August, 16 senior officials at the provincial and ministerial level, including the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Interior, were infected with the new crown in the Indian government.
But the 65-year-old Angadi was the first current senior official to die after being infected with new coronary pneumonia.
At present, India’s new crown epidemic has reported more than 90,000 deaths, and economic restart faces unpredictable risks.
As of September 24, 2020, the total number of confirmed cases of the new crown in India has exceeded 5.76 million, but with approximately 80,000 to 100,000 confirmed daily, the total number of confirmed cases in India has rapidly approached the United States, which currently has 7 million cases.
At the current rate of growth, it may soon become the country with the largest number of new coronavirus infections in the world.
Experts all over the world did not seem to be surprised by the emergence of this situation.
Detection increase
An Indian government scientist told a BBC reporter that the number of infection cases is "rising in a stepwise spiral", with a surge across India.
The only "comforting" thing is the low mortality rate: it is currently about 1.63%, which is lower than many countries with a high number of cases.
On July 21, 2020, local time, in Mumbai, India, a health volunteer from an NGO wearing protective clothing and a smart helmet equipped with a thermal scanning sensor checks the body temperature of residents from house to house in a residential area.
According to the analysis, the substantial increase in confirmed cases in India is related to increased testing, but the rapid spread of the virus worries experts.
The reason is that it took 170 days for the new crown of India to reach the millionth case.
But it took only 11 days to add one million cases.
The average daily number of cases has increased from 62 in April to more than 87,000 in September.
In mid-September, India recorded approximately 80,000 to over 90,000 cases and approximately 1,000 deaths per day.
Currently, seven states in India are most affected by the new crown epidemic, accounting for about 48% of the Indian population.
The economy restarts with the growth of the epidemic
However, even if the number of infected people has increased sharply, since September, India has announced the start of its fourth phase of the epidemic unblocking policy, further liberalizing all aspects of restrictions.
On July 23, local time, India-controlled Kashmir Srinagar, a local Urdu newspaper "Roshni", in order to raise people's awareness of the new crown pneumonia, provided readers with free masks and posted them on the front page.
India’s workplaces, public transportation, restaurants, and gyms are all reopening in an attempt to repair the declining economy that has suffered the most trauma in decades.
The strictest blockade in the world forced people to stay at home and shut down businesses, resulting in the return of millions of informal workers, who lost their jobs in the cities and walked, took buses and trains home.
However, the Nomura India Business Recovery Index (NIBRI) shows that despite the spiraling increase in the number of confirmed infections, the recovery of economic activity also implies that people are "tired and tired" of the epidemic lockdown.
The actual number of infections may be much higher
So far, more than 50 million Indians have been tested for the virus.
But the country still has one of the lowest testing rates in the world.
Therefore, some epidemiologists believe that the actual infection rate in India is much higher.
A customer in India got his own mask for a try.
An antibody test conducted by the Indian government on a random sample of people across the country estimated that 6.4 million people had been infected in early May, while the number of confirmed cases recorded at that time was only 52,000.
Bramar Mukherjee, professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan, has been closely following the epidemic.
She said her model points out that there are currently about 100 million infections in India.
She told a BBC reporter: "I think India has chosen to go with the flow and develop herd immunity. I am not sure whether everyone follows preventive measures, such as taking masks seriously and maintaining social distance."
Herd immunity is when enough people develop immunity to the virus, enough to prevent the spread of the virus, that is, to realize the immunity of the group to the virus.
She said: "This may be due to habituation, desensitization (to the new coronavirus), fatigue, denial, resignation or a combination of the two. It feels like it has become normal for a thousand people to die every day."
According to the article, as long as the number of infected cases is still rising sharply, the full recovery of the economy will be delayed, and hospitals and care centers may continue to be overwhelmed by the surge of cases.
K Srinath Reddy, chairman of the Indian Public Health Foundation, a Delhi-based think tank, described the current surge in infections as "the first wave, not the first wave."
He said: "A wave is moving outward from the original origin, and the propagation time and the ascent level are different. Together they constitute a big climax, and it has not yet shown signs of ebb."
Why is the infection rate still soaring?
Professor Mukherjee said: “As crowd activities increase and compliance with restrictions on social distancing, wearing masks and personal hygiene decreases, the virus infection rate will soar again.”
A doctor at a large hospital in Jodhpur in Rajasthan told reporters that they have seen a surge of seriously ill elderly patients living in large families with multiple members.
On May 25th, passengers wearing protective clothing and face masks traveled at Shiragee International Airport in Mumbai, India.
The Indian government allows domestic routes to resume from May 25.
As early as March, the well-known virologist Dr. T. Jacob John warned that India was facing a "large avalanche-like epidemic."
By September, he said that in many ways, a large number of cases in a large country that the public health system cannot cope with is "inevitable."
However, he added that even so, the current high number of infections could have been avoided, and he accused the epidemic prevention blockade of improper time.
Most health experts believe that if the Indian government had implemented a partial and well-managed epidemic prevention blockade in a few cities where the epidemic occurred, the situation would now be much better.
Kaushik Basu, the former chief economist of the World Bank, said: “India failed because it did exactly what it shouldn’t do during the blockade. Instead, the blockade imposed by India led to a large-scale movement of people. I had no choice but to walk back to my hometowns across the country. As a result, not only did India’s economy suffer, but the new coronavirus continued to spread.
However, some Indian public health experts believe that the epidemic prevention blockade saves lives, and it is not easy to determine the timing of the lockdown, because even developed countries such as the United Kingdom have criticized the government for not being able to block in time and that earlier blockades can save more lives.
Number of deaths
Epidemiologists believe that regardless of the effectiveness of the blockade adopted by India, it does help the country gain time, learn more about the virus, and establish a treatment plan and monitoring system that did not exist in March.
With the approach of winter, India currently has more than 15,000 new crown treatment medical facilities and more than 1 million dedicated isolation beds.
By September, the Indian media no longer reported the lack of masks, protective equipment and ventilators like in March.
However, the supply of medical oxygen has been insufficient in recent weeks.
Dr. Mukherjee said that strengthening medical care and COVID-19 treatment facilities helped India maintain a low mortality rate.
However, the epidemic of the new crown epidemic has caused India's already weak public health system to collapse.
The limited medical staff was exhausted.
The government urges people to wear masks in public to curb the spread of the virus.
Dr. Mukherjee believes that the new crown epidemic in India will continue to grow slowly and steadily until all states can contain its development.
She said that what India needs is a nationally coordinated federal long-term strategy.