1 million Covid-19 infections in India, toll nears 25,600
By : jhalak Punjab bureau
New Delhi, 18 july, 2020
India had 343,268 active cases and the case fatality rate (CFR) — the proportion of people who succumbed to the illness from among known infections — was 2.5%.
coronavirus,Covid 19,coronavirus India
A BMC health care worker checks the temperature of the resident at Dharavi during Covid-19 pandemic in Mumbai on Thursday.
India on Thursday became only the third country in the world — after the United States and Brazil — to hit a million Covid-19 infections, with 36,247 new cases taking the country’s tally to 1,004,652, and 690 new fatalities putting the disease death toll in the four-and-a-half months of the outbreak at 25,594.
Experts estimate the next million to take less than a month — the doubling rate stands at 20.6 days — and say the focus now needs to shift to rural parts of the country that traditionally have been beyond the reach of adequate health care mechanisms, and where new hot spots are now feared to pop up.
On Thursday, India had 343,268 active cases and the case fatality rate (CFR) — the proportion of people who succumbed to the illness from among known infections — was 2.5%. The US, which has 3,648,250 cases and 140,518 deaths, has a fatality rate of 3.9%; and Brazil, with 1,978,236 cases and 75,697 infections, is at 3.8%.
India’s journey to a million cases took 137 days, and half of these were in a hard nationwide lockdown announced in the early days of the outbreak — a strategy that officials and experts said bought the country precious time to set up isolation centres, add hospital beds and beef up testing infrastructure. With crippling economic costs piling up, the country began unlocking in June, when the outbreak was on a sharp upward trajectory.
