In India, 60% of COVID-19 patients had at least one ‘co-morbidity’ and nearly 78% of them were under 50, says data from the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP), a Health Ministry body, that’s tasked with monitoring disease outbreaks across the country.
The data is only a fraction — less than 1,00,000 — of the confirmed positive cases that today exceeds over 6,50,000 but is based on hospital data and offers glimpses into the unique characteristics of the spread of the disease.
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For instance, while co-morbidities are known to be a major risk factor for death, well-known risk factors — hypertension and diabetes — appeared to play a limited role as far as testing positive for the disease is concerned. Only 8% of 16,155, whose data was publicised by the IDSP, were diabetic and 9% hypertensive. Previous studies have shown that the overall prevalence of hypertension was 29% and diabetes, around 11%. Nearly 30% of