Will India become world’s new virus epicentre?

Rising COVID-19 cases threatens to make India world’s new virus epicentre, soon likely to surpass Brazil and ultimately the U.S. — the worst affected countries so far.

On Sunday (August 30), 78,761 new cases were detected — the highest any country has ever reported in one day. With 971 deaths on Monday, India is way past Mexico for the third-highest number of deaths worldwide. Going by the present trend, India’s outbreak will eclipse Brazil’s in about a week, and the U.S. in about two months.

While the pandemic impact is dwindling gradually in the US and Brazil, India’s case count continues to grow seven months after the first coronavirus case was reported on January 30.

After spreading its influence across big cities, the virus has only just penetrated the vast rural hinterland where the bulk of India’s 1.3 billion population lives.

“As the world’s second-largest country, and one with a relatively poor public health system, it’s inevitable that India’s outbreak becomes the world’s biggest,” said Naman Shah, an adjunct faculty member at the country’s National Institute of Epidemiology, while speaking to Bloomberg.

“It would not be surprising, regardless of what India does,” said Shah, a member of the Indian government’s Covid-19 task force.

What makes the spread of novel coronavirus a unique challenge for developing countries is the densely packed slums where lakhs of people living in close proximity to each other present ideal conditions for the virus to spread. Shutting down the economy has not helped so far because that means human misery at the cost of human health.

As a result, economies have been forced to open up even with the virus still remains active. The list of worst-affected countries globally has accordingly shifted from rich to poor. There was a time when Italy, Spain and the U.K. had the biggest outbreaks and highest death tolls. Now the U.S is the only advanced economy in the top ten, others are developing nations like Mexico, Peru and South Africa.

India remains the worst affected. A national lockdown imposed in March had to be lifted after two months as the economy sunk bringing in joblessness, starvation and mass migration.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi too has appealed to the people to learn to “live with the virus” even as the nation continues the unlock process, opening up the economy one step at a time.

The economy is projected to have shrunk 18 per cent in the quarter to June from a year ago, more than any other major Asian country.

Experts believe the virus has spread far and wide and India’s reported tally of 3.6 million infections does not give the “real picture”. And there is every reason to believe that Covid-19 is still only getting started in India.

“What we’ve done is delay the infections, but we haven’t been able to curtail the transmission,” CDDEP’s Laxminarayan. “And that was never going to be possible in a country the size of India and with the health infrastructure, India has. What has played out is almost exactly what one should have expected.”