What changes after 21 days of lockdown: India's coronavirus trajectory
Coronavirus in India
Despite 21 days of stringent lockdown measures, coronavirus continues to spread rapidly across India. The deadly virus has which has infected more than 10,000 people in the country.
The increase in cases has forced the government to extend social isolation norms till May.
Reports suggest thatinitial steps of caution and swift action in treating the sick helped India in containing the virus.
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the lockdown by another 19 days but, also highlighted how India had effectively fared well as compared to other countries in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.
But, the contrarian view argues that India was not carrying out enough tests to assess the situation. Before PM Modi announced lockdown measures across the country, India recorded 536 cases of infection, nine deaths and had carried out 22,694 tests.
However, during the period of lockdown, more than 2,15,000 tests were conducted and the total number of cases surpassed 10,000 with close to 339 deaths.
Medical practitioners and experts had raised concerns over the scale of testing in India but, there has been a significant drop in new cases as the government is expanding testing centres to non-hotspots areas and conducting more tests.
The data on daily additional cases also suggest that India is not heading towards geometrical progression in its COVID-19 cases. In fact, there is amassive dip in new cases registered on some days.
A few days ago, the ministry of health and family welfare highlighted the importance of containment measures and projected what would have been the case if India had acted otherwise. In a scenario where had India not considered lockdown - the number of cases would have reached 2 lakh cases by April 11 and by April 15 --the number of cases would have surged to 8 lakh cases.
Under scenario two, where containment measures is being adopted without lockdown, the number of cases would have reached over 45,000 cases by April 11 and by April 15, the number of cases would have surpassed over one lakh cases.
However, in the current scenario where India has enforced both containment measures and a lockdown, the number of coronavirus cases have been restricted to over 10,000 cases.
As of today, the virus has infected more than 10,000 people and has killed over 339 people in India.=, however, increased testing and lockdown measures continue to dispel skepticism surrounding the outbreak in India.
In fact, the data on new cases, and earlier projections have reaffirmed India's resilience in fighting the virus.