The head of India’s Council of Medical Research, Dr. Balram Bhargava, said that lockdown restrictions should continue in all districts where the positivity levels are above 10%. Up to now, Prime Minister Modi has forsworn a national lockdown, leaving such decisions to each state. Positivity levels nationally have hovered above 20% for weeks now, and presently about three-quarters of India’s 718 districts are over 10% positivity. This includes New Delhi, Mumbai and the technological hub of Bengaluru.
The past week has seen the first modest drop in 7-day official new cases; the last several weeks, however, have left hospitals and funeral homes overwhelmed. Perhaps the biggest of the unknowns is how deeply the Covid-19 infections have burned into the hinterlands of India, where the lack of sufficient medical infrastructure would translate into a massive presence of the coronavirus for prolonged periods, leading to unknown levels of mutations - a recipe for possibly more severe and/or transmissible variants.
