Coronavirus: India passes two million cases after infections double in record 20 days

Country likely months away from virus peak, experts say, even as lockdown measures continue to be eased

The number of coronavirus cases in India has passed two million after a record rise in daily infections, according to government figures.

India remained the country with the third-highest number of Covid-19 cases after officials reported a total of 2,027,074 confirmed cases on Friday morning, up 62,538 on the previous day.

The grim milestone was passed only 20 days after India hit one million cases, marking a world-record rise which outstrips that of Brazil, the country with the second-highest total cases and where the same rise took nearly four weeks.

Brazil passed the two million mark in mid-July, behind only the US, where the total number of cases nears five million.

Despite having the third-highest number of cases, India has reported only the fifth-highest number of deaths from the virus at 41,585, behind Mexico and the UK.

The country’s low, and falling, death rate has been the subject of speculation from critics who have accused the government of undercounting deaths through delays in reporting and rules on whether deaths are determined to have been caused by the virus. Greater numbers of people in India die without receiving medical attention too, making them less likely to be tested, while the country has a poor record generally on medically certifying deaths.

Since early June, the government has been lifting lockdown measures in an effort to boost the economy of the world’s second most populous country.

Despite falling cases in major cities such as Mumbai and Delhi, rural regions are seeing infections surge and new local lockdowns are in place in numerous areas. Experts say the country is likely to be months away from hitting the peak of the virus.

“A country of India's size and diversity has multiple epidemics in different phases,” said Rajib Dasgupta, head of the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Testing has risen across the country but regional figures show an imbalance in the rate of testing across different states.

Bihar, a largely rural state which is India’s third-largest by population, for example has conducted 5,300 tests per million people, while metropolitan Delhi’s rate is more than 10 times that at 56,000 per million.

Of the more than two million total cases, 607,384 are defined as active by India’s government.

Additional reporting by Reuters