India Sets World Record For Covid-19 Deaths; Records 4,500 Death in Just 24 Hours

India has set another coronavirus milestone this week. On Wednesday, authorities announced the country had recorded more than 4,500 deaths from covid-19 for the prior 24 hours, setting a world record.

That number of deaths — higher than the previous record of 4,400 set in the United States on Jan. 20 — comes as new cases appear to be declining in India, following days on end when new daily cases broke records in late April and early May, peaking at more than 414,000 on May 6.

As The Washington Post’s Joanna Slater reports from New Delhi, deaths from covid-19, the disease the virus causes, lag infections by several weeks. Despite the record number of deaths, there are some positive signs that India’s surge may be slowing, with less than 300,000 new daily cases this week. But there have been long-standing questions about the accuracy of the numbers recorded in India.

Even now, Slater writes, “in India’s vast hinterland, scores of people are dying with covid symptoms without being tested.” And amid this uncertainty, health experts on Wednesday debated among themselves what the rising number of recorded deaths actually meant.

Chandrakant Lahariya argued that the surge in new covid-19 deaths may be influenced by aggressive new attempts to rectify problems with the reporting of deaths. Many states were still lagging, the New Delhi-based health policy expert wrote on Twitter, meaning that India’s covid-19 deaths may remain high for a while.

Even as new daily cases fall in coming weeks, “new daily deaths may stay at very similar and narrow high flat curve, for a few weeks, before getting into a downward trend,” Lahariya wrote.

Those deaths will add to a huge toll. As it stands now, there have been well over 25 million recorded cases of the coronavirus among India’s 1.4 billion population. The official death toll stands at more than 283,000.

Please send us your articles for publication via enewsghana1@gmail.com