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 Officials said the spike in cases was a fresh challenge for the
country's health authorities, even as they struggle to check the
outbreak in cities amid the easing of a months-long lockdown.
Confirmed cases in India crossed the 200,000 mark on Wednesday. Some
experts say that a peak remains weeks away.
Dr. Naman Shah, an epidemiologist and physician advising a federal
government coronavirus task force, said rural outbreaks could be
"devastating" given the inadequate number of doctors and health
facilities.
"High levels of co-morbidity, high levels of under-nutrition and a
weak health infrastructure, that's just the recipe for high
mortality," said Shah, who is based in rural central India.
In the eastern state of Bihar, official data showed that of the
3,872 coronavirus cases recorded until June 1, 2,743 were linked to
migrants workers who returned after May 3, when the government began
to run trains and buses to reduce the exodus on foot.
Graphic: India COVID-19 cases rise as migrants return home
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All transport in India was suspended in late March, when Prime
Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown in an attempt
to contain COVID-19, the lung disease caused by the virus.
Most of those workers who tested positive in Bihar came from India's
capital New Delhi and the more industrialised western states of
Maharashtra and Gujarat, the data showed.
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Workers returning from western India also triggered a massive spike
in cases in Jharkhand, a poor eastern state that borders Bihar, its
top health official Nitin Madan Kulkarni said.
"After May 2, whatever positive cases we have got, almost 90% of
them are migrant workers," Kulkarni told Reuters. The state
currently has 752 confirmed cases, up from 111 on May 1.
As migrant workers fan out to their villages, some states with an
existing heavy burden of cases are facing a second wave of
infections.
In Maharashtra, which at nearly 75,000 infections accounts for a
third of the total cases in the country, officials in some rural
districts said their state-run health centres were struggling with
the influx.
Graphic: Rural COVID-19 cases surge in Maharashtra
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"If this pace continues for the next few weeks, then we will have no
choice but to take control of private hospitals to treat severe
patients," an official in the rural western district of Satara said.
(Additional reporting by Saurabh Sharma in LUCKNOW, Jatindra Dash in
Bhubaneshwar, Zarir Hussain in GUWAHATI, Abhirup Roy in MUMBAI and
Subrata Nagchoudhary in KOLKATA; Editing by Euan Rocha and Alex
Richardson)
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