India’s coronavirus cases have spiked in recent days, fueling concerns the situation could spiral out of control even as the country starts to reopen after weeks of stringent lockdown.
India is the fourth worst-hit nation in the world, with cumulative infection numbers over 320,000 — behind only the United States, Brazil and Russia, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Daily reported cases in South Asia’s most populous nation hovered near, and sometimes exceeded, 10,000 per day over the last several days. As of 8 a.m. local time Sunday, there were 11,929 new cases of infection, according to government data.
The high infection numbers also makes India the worst-affected Asian country. Russia, which has the third highest number of cases in the world, is technically part of both Europe and Asia, but most of its major cities are in the European part.
The city of Delhi is said to have become a recent hotspot, with accounts of people struggling to get a hospital bed there and some saying their loved ones died on the doorsteps of medical centers that refused to take them in, Reuters reported.
The deputy chief minister for Delhi told reporters that cases in the national capital region is expected to grow to 550,000 by the end of July, according to the news wire. Delhi reported more than 38,900 total cases as of Sunday morning.
“Last two, three weeks have seen a very significant increase in the number of cases every day,” Arvind Kumar, chairman of the Center for Chest Surgery at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi, told CNBC’s “Street Signs” on Friday.
The number of infections have risen despite India being in a strict lockdown that began in late March. After a few rounds of extensions, the country finally lifted those measures at the end of May. Still, some states and regions have restrictions in place and many districts are now demarcated into low-risk and high-risk zones. In low-risk areas, economic activity is resuming slowly, while the high-risk zones activities remain restricted.
As a medical doctor, Kumar said he has been appealing to people not to think “everything has returned to normal” — just because the lockdown has officially ended. He cautioned against “moving out and mingling in large numbers.”
News Source: CNBC
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