It's critical that India does not become another Covid-19 hotspot
Add BT as a preferred sourceAS THE Covid-19 pandemic sweeps through the world with now more than 220,000 confirmed cases and some 9,000 deaths, one country - the world's second most populous, no less - seems to have slowed the exponential growth of the coronavirus.
While India's Ministry of Health website shows only 166 confirmed cases as on March 19, another tally citing World Health Organization (WHO) data put the figure a bit higher at 174. For a nation of 1.3 billion people, India's Covid-19 figures look grossly understated - due, no doubt, to the extremely small number of tests being done. In response to such criticisms, the Indian Council for Medical Research collected 1,020 random samples from hospital patients with pneumonia and other flu-like illnesses, and apparently, so far, the results have returned negative for Covid-19.
So if one were to take India's novel coronavirus infection tally as 174 (or a rounded 200), in terms of total number of cases per one million people, it works out to just 0.1. The comparative figure for China is 56 per one million, Italy 591, Iran 207 and Spain 316. These four countries account for some 150,000 cases - or around 70 per cent of the total number of global cases as on March 18.
