With India recording a first-time-ever three-digit rise in the confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, the Health Ministry on Saturday said that had a lockdown not been imposed, the country would have been staring at least 8,00,000 cases by April 15. The Ministry reported over 7,200 cases on Saturday.
COVID-19 | Interactive map of confirmed coronavirus cases in India
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) — the technical arm of the Ministry that is overseeing testing and epidemiology — was not involved in preparing this estimate, Lav Agrawal, spokesperson of the Ministry, said at the daily media briefing.
He displayed a graph that showed three curves: One a red curve, denoting neither lockdown nor containment in place, that steeply rose to 2,08,544 cases on April 9 (and with a note that it would extend to 8.2 lakh by April 15); a blue, gentler curve that rose to 45,370 by April 11 (and 1.2 lakh cases by April 15), the blue indicating the situation with “containment measures but no lockdown”; and the final green line indicating the 7,447 cases at present.
“Lockdown and containment measures are important to fight COVID-19. If we had not taken any measures, we might have had 2 lakh cases at this time (April 11),” Mr. Agrawal added. There were no fu