Is India on right track to defeat coronavirus? What numbers tell

India has completed 27 days of nationwide lockdown and since the European countries have finally begun showing some, but, significant success against the novel coronavirus.

The focus will now shift to South Asia and Africa, where concerns regarding preparations are immense and resources are limited. In South Asia, if the COVID-19 outbreak grows rapidly, a large country like India which has the second-largest population in the world and a health system not to boast about, the damage could be unimaginable. One must also keep in mind that this lockdown in India has given time toincrease thetesting, strengthen COVID-19 treatment facilities, and create more isolation and quarantine centres in the country.

Here, I will try to address, where India stands now in terms of saving lives and containing the spread of the virus. Is India on the right trajectory or the light towards the end of the tunnel seems afar?

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Testing

Initially, when the outbreak began in India, health experts were worried that India was not testing enough and that possibly could be a reason behind its low infections. On April 5, India was testing at the rate of 93 people per million of its population, and it has gone up to over 211 in two weeks. This figure, however, doesn't look good, since all the countries that have more infections than India are conducting over 10,000 tests per million of their population, except Brazil, which conducts over 1,000 tests. India is the second-most populous country which means no testing will ever be enough and we have tested over 4 lakh people by now.

India tested just over 16,000 people for coronavirus on April 9, and now 27,000-30,000 people are getting tested every day. And the daily rise of COVID-19 infections is 1200,1500 cases from in the lasttwo weeks, which suggests that even though the country is testing a lot more people, the cases are not escalating at the same pace. This gives us some evidence that the lockdown is managing to contain the spread of the virus.

Test Positivity Rate

There is another parameter called the test positivity rate (TPR). TPR is a rate that evaluates the number of people getting coronavirus-infected out of the total people who got testedand the good news for India is that it ranks very low in this and only South Korea has a better TPR. According to ICMR, one person out of 23 tested in India, gets infected with COVID-19, which means a TPR of 4.4 per cent, as per data released on April 19. Italy and Spain's TPR are more than 10 per cent, with the US recording nearly 20 per cent.

Doubling rate

Another measurement to know how coronavirus is spreading is the doubling rate, which tells us the time taken for infections to double itself. If the doubling rate is more, it suggests the containment of the virus. Initially, India took five days to double from 750 cases to 1500, and now that rate has grown to 7.5 days. This is encouraging as main coronavirus-hit countries have a doubling rate of 3-5 days at this stage and include countries from China to the US.

Recovery rate

In one line, the coronavirus recovery rate in India is getting better by the day. As per the latest updates, 17.48 per cent have recovered in India out of the total infected cases. On April 1, during the initial days of the nationwide lockdown, this rate was a tad over 8 per cent. So from April 1-21, the recovery rate has more than doubled.

Let's give it some context, the US is the worst-affected country suffering from coronavirus and its recovery rate is about 9 per cent. However, these rates in Italy and Spain, who are the other hard-hit countries, are way more, 27 per cent and 40 per cent. What lockdown has achieved in India, so far,is that the daily infections rise is in the range of 1200-1500 cases for quite some time, and if it remains the same way, the rate of recovery is likely to improve.

RO

RO tells us the rate at which an infected patient passes the disease to a healthy person. The lower the RO, the better for society, and India's RO is slowing down continuously, with the latest rate standing at 1.36, down from 1.55 on April 11, as per a report.

So, even though, the figures look encouraging, to make any concrete prediction about thisvirus in a large country like India will be childish. However, at a time when advanced economies are also on their toes, any good news from the backyard is welcomed.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)