The health situation is worsening day by day in India.
The country has recorded nearly 350,000 new cases of Covid-19 contamination and more than 2,700 deaths in the past 24 hours.
The country must also face a new variant that has appeared on its territory, which makes it more difficult to curb the epidemic.
India ranks fourth in the world in terms of deaths, with more than 192,000 people losing their lives since the start of the crisis.
Local authorities fear a lack of oxygen, vital for treating coronavirus patients, and hospitals across the country are on the verge of saturation.
Several countries have mobilized to come to the aid of India, like the United Kingdom or France.
In view of the health situation, the daily number of deaths could continue to increase in the coming weeks if the sick cannot be treated.
An increase in deaths since March
India seems to have gone through the first wave of the Covid-19 epidemic with less difficulty than France if we look at data from the organization Our World in Data. While the latter peaked at nearly 14 deaths per million population on April 10, 2020, India compared a rate of 0.018 deaths per million population on the same date. However, this must be put into perspective with the population of these two countries (67 million inhabitants for France and 1.36 billion in India) or their age pyramid (younger population in India) respectively.
When a real drop is felt in France from April to mid-September 2020, the situation tends to be reversed in India, where the country is experiencing an increase in deaths per million inhabitants during the summer. And since March 2021, there has been a continuous increase in the number of deaths per million inhabitants, exceeding the peak in September and reaching a level never seen in the country so far. Note: data related to mortality may be incomplete in India, estimate several experts, which is not the case in France.
Regarding the cases identified, there has also been a continuous increase in India for a few weeks, with never-before-seen figures.
And if they remain officially above the incidence in France, it should be remembered that these figures depend above all on the testing policy.
We must therefore remain cautious, in particular for India, because these are the cases identified and not all the contaminations that may have taken place in the country.
In terms of daily tests per thousand inhabitants, India is placed well below France, which indeed suggests that a number of cases are not known.
When we report the data to the population, France tests much more than the Asian giant, the latter reaching only one test per thousand inhabitants in April, while France has crossed this threshold since July 2020.
As for vaccination, France is above India in the number of daily injections per million inhabitants. If the Indian curve has continued to grow since the start of the vaccination campaign in the country, it experienced a decline in the number of vaccinations between April 10 and April 21. The country must indeed face vaccine shortages that affect some states. On April 13, local authorities urgently authorized the Russian vaccine Sputnik V to bolster the vaccination campaign. To date, more than 139 million Indians have received a first dose (against 19 million in France) but compared to its population, they are less than 10% to be vaccinated.
From May 1, all adults over 18 will be eligible for vaccination in India. The country hopes to maintain its target of 250 million people vaccinated in July.