Districts In South India Leading Rise In Active Covid-19 Cases: Credit Suisse

Increase in active Covid-19 caseload is now being driven by districts in southern India, according to data compiled by Credit Suisse.

Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh accounted for 65% of the incremental active cases over the last one week, the research firm said in a note. And while national active cases continued to rise, infections in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh have shown signs of plateauing.

India is now the only country in the world to report more than 4 lakh fresh cases in a day. Total active infections crossed 36 lakh for the first time as on May 7.

Besides mounting cases, an increase in fatalities is a big worry as India struggles with shortage of oxygen, beds and critical drugs.

The spread of deaths, according to Credit Suisse, is worsening. Mortalities have risen 34% over the last one week, with daily case fatality rate at 0.9% during the period.

Now 312 districts are reporting more than double the deaths they were seeing during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic last year, Credit Suisse said.

“Our earlier expectation that deaths would start to fall meaningfully by now has been delayed by a few weeks due to unexpectedly large rural spread keeping deaths high in cities due to patient migration and slowing vaccinations,” it said.

Vaccine Crunch

The slowing pace of vaccination in the country, despite an expanded immunisation programme that now includes everyone over 18 years of age, is another concern, as ahas also been flagged by previous BloombergQuint stories.

Over the last two weeks, daily vaccination numbers have fallen to less than 30 lakh across India, Credit Suisse said.

BloombergQuint reported that while the country has been doing an average 25.2 lakh vaccinations daily for the last one month (April), the pace further slowed in early May.

But among some of India’s most populous states, there have been hints of a pickup in the past few days. For instance, in Maharashtra.

As on May 6, states had more than 89 lakh balance doses in their inventories for vaccinating those aged over 45 years. Another 28.9 lakh doses for the same age group will be provided by the central government in the next three days.

For vaccinating the 18-44-year olds, states have to procure doses directly from the manufacturers. While some states have placed orders and procured limited doses, there is no public data available on this.

Note: To be clear, data on Covid cases and related deaths may be severely deficient as several states have inadequate testing, chronic underreporting and have been reportedly also concealing such data by attributing deaths to other causes.