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 For months now, nowhere in the world has been hit harder than India
by the pandemic, as a new strain of the virus fuelled a surge in
infections that has risen to more than 400,000 daily.
Even with a downturn over the past few days, experts said there was
no certainty that infections had peaked, with alarm growing both at
home and abroad over the highly contagious B.1.617 variant first
found in India.
"There are still many parts of the country which have not yet
experienced the peak, they are still going up," World Health
Organization Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan was quoted as saying
in the Hindu newspaper.
Swaminathan pointed to the "very high" national positivity rate, at
about 20% of tests conducted, as a sign that there could be worse to
come.
"Testing is still inadequate in a large number of states. And when
you see high test positivity rates, clearly we are not testing
enough.
"And so the absolute numbers actually don't mean anything when they
are taken just by themselves; they have to be taken in the context
of how much testing is done, and test positivity rate."
Having begun to decline last week, new infections over the past 24
hours were put at 281,386 by the health ministry on Monday, dropping
below 300,000 for the first time since April 21. The daily death
count stood at 4,106.
At the current rate, India's total caseload since the epidemic began
a year ago should pass the 25 million mark in the next couple of
days. Total deaths were put at 274,390.
Hospitals have had to turn patients away while mortuaries and
crematoriums have been unable to cope with bodies piling up.
Photographs and television images of funeral pyres burning in
parking lots and corpses washing up on the banks of the Ganges river
have fuelled impatience with the government's handling of the
crisis.
It is widely accepted that the official figures grossly
underestimate the real impact of the epidemic, with some experts
saying actual infections and deaths could be five to 10 times
higher.
'ILLUSION'
Whereas the first wave of the epidemic in India, which peaked in
September, was concentrated in urban areas, where testing was
introduced faster, the second wave that erupted in February is
rampaging through rural towns and villages, where about two-thirds
of the country's 1.35 billion people live, and testing in those
places is very patchy.
"This drop in confirmed COVID cases in India is an illusion," S.
Vincent Rajkumar, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in the
United States, said on Twitter.
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 "First, due to limited testing,
the total number of cases is a huge
underestimate. Second, confirmed cases can only
occur where you can confirm: the urban areas.
Rural areas are not getting counted."
A cyclone on course to hit the west coast on
Monday is expected to disrupt both testing and
vaccination efforts in Gujarat, Prime Minister
Narendra Modi's home state, where infections
have risen 30% since May 2. Nearly 150,000
people were moved from their homes in Gujarat to
safety as the most intense cyclone in more than
two decades roared up the coast.
While lockdowns have helped limit cases in parts of the country hit
during an initial surge of infections in February and April, such as
Maharashtra and Delhi, rural areas and some states are dealing with
fresh surges.
The government issued detailed guidelines on Sunday for monitoring
COVID-19 cases, with the health ministry asking villages to look out
for people with flu-like illness and get them tested for the
coronavirus.
Modi has come under fire for his messaging to the public, a decision
to leave key decisions on lockdowns to states, and the slow rollout
of an immunisation campaign in the world's biggest vaccine producer.
India has fully vaccinated just over 40.4 million people, or 2.9% of
its population.
On Monday, the health ministry said a government panel had found 26
suspected cases of bleeding and clotting among recipients of the
AstraZeneca vaccine, describing the risk as "minuscule" out of 164
million doses administered.
A top virologist told Reuters on Sunday that he had resigned from a
forum of scientific advisers set up by the government to detect
variants of the coronavirus.
Shahid Jameel, chair of the scientific advisory group of the forum
known as INSACOG, declined to say why he had resigned but said he
was concerned that authorities were not paying enough attention to
the evidence as they set policy.
(Global vaccination tracker: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/vaccination-rollout-and-access/)
(Reporting by Neha Arora, Tanvi Mehta in NEW DELHI and Rama Venkat
in Bengaluru; Writing by Simon Cameron-Moore, editing by Robert
Birsel and Gareth Jones)
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