India’s Covid toll set to cross 1 lakh

The number of deaths climbed to 95,542 on Monday with health authorities recording 1,039 deaths over the previous 24 hours

TT, New Delhi, 29.09.20: India’s death toll from the new coronavirus disease is set to surpass 100,000 this week if daily mortality trends observed through September persist despite a 50 per cent fall in the country’s case fatality rate over the past three months.

The number of Covid-19 deaths climbed to 95,542 on Monday with health authorities recording 1,039 deaths over the previous 24 hours. The daily nationwide mortality figure has always been greater than 1,000 through September after 819 deaths on August 31.

The Union health ministry said on Monday that 10 states accounted for 84 per cent of the deaths recorded over the previous 24 hours with Maharashtra alone making up 360 (36 per cent) of the deaths. The others are Tamil Nadu (80), Karnataka (79), Uttar Pradesh (77), Bengal (60), Punjab (50), Andhra Pradesh (45), Delhi (42), Chhattisgarh (31), and Madhya Pradesh (26).

Health experts expect the country’s Covid-19 deaths to exceed 100,000 by Friday this week if the September trend persists. Although the average numbers of daily new infections have shown a declining trend since mid-September, experts say any impact on daily deaths will show up after a lag period.

The country’s Covid-19 case fatality rate — the proportion of deaths among Covid-19 patients — has dropped from around 3.3 per cent in mid-June to 1.57 per cent on Monday.

The seven-day average of new cases has fallen from around 93,000 on September 16 to 83,000 on September 27. But public health specialists say they do not have adequate data to determine what factors might have contributed to this fall in new cases.

“We still have a very large epidemic,” said Oommen John, a physician and senior researcher at The George Institute for Global Health, New Delhi.

“The patterns of infections and deaths we’re seeing appear to reflect the local capacity of health systems to respond to the pandemic.”

Health authorities recorded 82,170 new Covid-19 cases on Monday with the same 10 states accounting for 79 per cent of those cases — Maharashtra accounting for the largest addition (18,056 cases) followed by Karnataka (9,543), Kerala (7,445), Andhra Pradesh (6,923), Tamil Nadu (5,791), Uttar Pradesh (4,250), Odisha (3,922), Delhi (3,292), Bengal (3,185) and Madhya Pradesh (2,310).

“It is surprising to see 7,445 cases in Kerala and less than 5,000 in Uttar Pradesh despite its much larger population,” said John.

Although the two states might be in different states of the epidemic, John said, the differences in numbers are more likely the outcome of health-seeking behaviour and the capacity of local health systems to respond to demand for testing.