Registering a new high in the number of daily cases detected — 10,085 — India on June 6 overtook Spain to become the country with the fifth highest confirmed COVID-19 infections (2,46,292). The rise in cases comes despite the fact that 1,37,938 samples were tested on June 6, down from 1,43,661 on June 5, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
The death toll increased by 292 to 6,941, even as the recovery rate remained at close to 48%. Cases have steadily risen, doubling every 17 days, among the fastest in countries with the most infections.
Coronavirus | India is still at risk, says WHO expert
The increase in infections is reflected in a study led by officials at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), a Union Health Ministry body, tasked with disease surveillance. The study found that India’s reproduction number (R0), or the average number of people a single COVID-positive patient infects, has increased between lockdown 1.0 and the beginning of lockdown 3.0. Moreover, India needs 621 million ‘recoveries’ to achieve ‘herd immunity’ at current rates of disease transmission, says the study that appeared online on June 2 in the peer-reviewed Indian Journal of Public Health (IJPH).
India reported its first 100 cases on March 15, and its effective transmission rate then was 2.51. That means, on average, every two infected persons were infecting five others. However, not everyone spreads the virus equally. Some may have higher viral load, some a reduced load and yet others may be more mobile and spread it wider than more sedentary persons. To factor these varying rates of spread, epidemiologists compute reproduction rates in a population as an average. For a pandemic to end, this number must dip below 1.
The initiation of the lockdo