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India’s current covid situation: how it came to this and what needs to happen
As of 10th May, 2021, India registered about 400, 000 new positive cases of COVID-19, with nearly 23 million total COVID-19 cases in the country since the beginning of the pandemic, with nearly 80% cases occuring between March and May of 2021. At the time of writing this, the surge in the number of cases continue (see Figure 1, data source: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/india).
India covid cases
In parallel with this rapid surge in the number of cases, India has also experienced about 4000 deaths per day between March and May of 2021 and the surge in the number of people dying from COVID-19 continues. It is believed that these numbers are under-reported on the order of about 5–10 times of what has happened in India (Figure 2). Altogether, since the beginning of the pandemic in about February when India was first hit, nearly 250, 000 people have died due to COVID-19. Between February of 2020 and January of 2021, about 150, 000 people died, and about the same number of deaths were registered in three months since then, such is the ferocity of the new surge or wave of the infections.
