India’s deadly second wave is continuing to worsen, with daily new cases consistently exceeding 300,000 and deaths now having surpassed 3,000 a day. Hospitals are running out of intensive care beds and many are critically short of oxygen for treating patients.
Alarmingly, a lack of high-quality real-time data means that we don’t actually have a clear picture of just how bad the situation currently is, writes Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health at the University of Southampton. The proportion of people in India returning a positive result when tested is 18% – nearly double the World Health Organization’s target threshold of 10%. This suggests a large number of positive cases are going unrecorded, meaning the outbreak is actually larger than the numbers suggest.