Govt says India’s ranking as 7th worst affected nation misleading, it’s faring better than the rest

The government has presented data to suggest India was doing much better than several other worst-affected countries.

The Union health ministry on Tuesday claimed that it was wrong to judge the success of India’s coronavirus containment efforts by the number of positive cases-- 198,706—alone, which has led to the country climbing up the charts of the worst-affected countries to reach the 7th spot overall and stated that a balanced view could only be obtained by comparing data from a clutch of worst-affected countries with a combined population similar to India’s.

India’s coronavirus spread has increased dramatically in the past one month after restrictions on movement of people were eased. (PTI Photo)

“If we look at 14 countries with a combined population similar to India then we find that they even today, they have reported 22.5% more positive cases and 55.2 times more deaths,” said Lav Agarwal, joint secretary, health ministry.

The HT Guide to Coronavirus COVID-19

Agarwal also said that India’s recovery and fatality rates are much better than the world average. “The fatality rate in our country is 2.82%, one of the lowest—compared to the world average of 6.13%,” he said, before adding that even the figure of case fatality per lakh population in India is 0.41 compared to the world average of 4.9.

Pushing the argument that India had shown better disease management, agarwal said that India’s fatalities were concentrated among patients of a particular age group and with pre-existing health conditions.

Covid-19 outbreaks may be seasonal, scientists say

One in every two Coved-19 deaths in India has been from the senior citizen population, who constitute 10% of our total population. 73% of India’s Covid-19 fatalities are cases of co-morbiities such as diabetes, hypertension, heart and respiratory diseases,” he said.

He listed several focus areas in the containment effort which were behind this relative success.

“Early case identification, clinical management, surveillance, contact tracing; these efforts has helped us improve our fatality rate to 2.82%,” said Lav Agarwal.

India’s Covid-19 tally was just a little over 37,000 a month ago and has jumped more than five times. The number of deaths has also climbed—1,218 people were reported dead on May 2. According to the latest data, 95,526 people have been cured which translates into 48.07% recovery rate.