Grief News: India Again Records Daily Deaths Due To COVID-19

Illustration of extracting the graves of COVID-19 victims. (Wikimedia Commons/Behzad Alipour)

JAKARTA - India's dark record was broken again, when the country recorded a record of daily death due to COVID-19 which reached 4,025 cases, the Indian Ministry of Health reported Wednesday, May 12.

Meanwhile, daily cases of infection in the same report recorded 348,421 new cases, bringing the total number of COVID-19 infection cases in India to 23 million.

Even so, experts believe official figures overestimating the true scale of the epidemic's impact, and actual deaths and infections in India could be five to ten times higher.

"India's COVID-19 infection curve may show early signs of flattening, but the decline in the number of new infections is likely to be slow", Shahid Jameel, India's top virologist, told Reuters Wednesday, May 12.

"It is still too early to say whether we have reached its peak. There are several indications of ever-increasing cases. But we must not forget that this is a very high plain. We seem to flatten about 400,000 cases every day", he was quoted as saying by the Indian Express newspaper.

India, with a population of 1.4 billion people, currently accounts for one in three reported deaths from the coronavirus worldwide, according to a Reuters tally.

For the record, the second wave of brutal COVID-19 infections has spread from cities to small towns and villages, penetrating a fragile health system that is not ready for a large-scale crisis.

Separately, in a report published Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said the B.1.617 variant first identified in India has been detected in at least 44 countries so far. Who also classifies it as a variant of attention that requires higher tracking and analysis.