Senior citizens account for 50% of India's COVID-19 deaths

Nearly half of all coronavirus patients in the country have been cured, taking the recovery rate to over 48 per cent, reports Ruchika Chitravanshi

As coronavirus cases in India pass the 2,00,000 mark, nearly half of the patients have been cured, taking the recovery rate to over 48 per cent, according to the health ministry data.

More than 1 lakh people have recovered as of Thursday morning, while 6,075 have died.

India has the seventh-highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world, just ahead of France. “It is a wrong comparison... it should take into account the population of our country,” said Lav Agarwal, joint secretary, health ministry.

An age profile analysis shows that 10 per cent of India’s population, which falls in the bracket of 60 and above, accounts for 50 per cent of coronavirus-related deaths.

He said the overall performance of India is stable, with a 2.82 per cent fatality rate while around 14 countries with a cumulative population equal to India’s have seen 22.5 per cent more cases and 55 per cent more deaths compared to India.

“India’s fatality rate is among the lowest in the world... Globally it is 6.13 per cent... Fatality per lakh (100,000) population is also among the lowest in India at 0.41 against the global average of 4.9,” Agarwal said.

On whether India is in the community transmission stage, the Indian Council of Medical Research said, “Instead of using the word 'community transmission', we have to understand how much the disease has spread and where we stand in comparison to other countries,” said Nivedita Gupta, scientist, ICMR. She added that India was "very far away from the peak" of the coronavirus pandemic.

The ICMR is conducting a serological survey to understand the spread of the disease and around 34,000 individuals have been tested as part of the study. “The study is still going on... The results will be known to us by early next week,” Gupta added.

Over 3.9 million tests have been done in India so far, with more than 1,20,000 tests conducted in the last 24 hours, according to the ICMR data.

She said that there was no under-reporting of deaths in the country. “It is not fair to attribute all deaths to Covid-19. Hospitals are doing a causality assessment to find out if deaths are Covid or non-covid,” Gupta added.

Agarwal said there was no abnormal increase in the number of deaths in the mortuaries. “The country is in safe hands and continuous efforts are on to manage the disease,” he said.