By mid-June, India likely to have fourth highest Covid-19 cases globally
New Delhi: This week, India crossed the 2 lakh-mark in coronavirus cases and climbed up to the seventh spot among the worst affected countries globally. At this rate, it could be fourth most affected within two weeks.
The number of cases being discovered every day in India has seen a worrying rise, with over 8,000 cases coming to light every day since May 29. Over the course of Tuesday, June 2, India went past 2 lakh cases. However, the speed of growth of cases has slowed down, and cases are now doubling every 15 days.
How does this place India globally? India is currently seventh in terms of cumulative cases, having overtaken Iran, Germany and France. But over the last week, it has added the fourth highest number of cases each day, only behind Brazil, United States and Russia.
If the number of new cases added in the last week is kept constant, India will surpass Italy and Spain by the end of this week, and the United Kingdom by the middle of June. Given the growing number of cases in India and the slowing down of the spread in Europe, this is likely to happen even sooner.
And this, even as India continues to test at one of the lowest rates in the world. Despite discovering over 8,000 cases per day, India is currently testing just around 80 people for every one million population each day.
This means, India is testing even fewer people than middle-income Peru. If India ramped up testing to over 2,000 tests per million people per day as Russia is doing, it’s possible that we would be discovering many more cases than the current count.