Explained in 10 charts: India's grim journey to 25 million Covid cases

NEW DELHI: In yet another grim milestone, India on Tuesday became only the second country after the US to report over 25 million Covid infections.
Brazil, the world’s third worst-hit country, has reported over 15.6 million cases. No other country in the world has crossed the 10 million mark so far.

The relentless surge in cases during the second wave upended all projections about India's Covid trajectory and turned the country into the virus epicenter of the world.
Despite a recent dip in cases, India continues to outpace the US, Brazil and other hard-hit countries with the mammoth six-figure addition to its caseload every day.

Here's explaining the rapid turnaround in India's Covid situation during its second wave ...
Tsunami of cases
It took India almost 14 months to go from its first confirmed Covid case to its 12.5 millionth case. And the next 12.5 million cases took just 43 days.
India's doubling rate — days taken for the total cases to double — currently stands at 43.

This shows the magnitude of the Covid catastrophe India has witnessed over the last few weeks.
Comparatively, the hardest-hit nation US saw its cases double from 12.5 million to 25 million in 61 days. That is 18 more than India's count. Moreover, the doubling rate in the US has further improved as it continues to see a rapid decline in cases.
5 million in 14 days
India's last 5 million cases came in a record 14 days at an average of 3.57 lakh infections a day.
It took India as many as 219 days to go from 1 million to 5 million cases while the US took less than half the amount of time at 103 days.

However, the graph shows that India's subsequent addition of 5 million cases came at a much faster rate.
India added its last 10 million cases in just 29 days while the US had taken 47 days to cross the same milestone.
Death rate low, but so is testing

When it comes to deaths due to Covid, India is the third worst-hit in the world after the US and Brazil.
According to official figures, the US has reported over 6 lakh Covid deaths, Brazil 4.36 lakh and India 2.78 lakh.
Source: worldometers.info
In proportion to the size of its population, India's death numbers are even lower.
India has witnessed just 200 deaths per million population compared to US' 1,805 and Brazil's 2,043.

However, a recent report has suggested that most hard hit nations like the US, India and others have seriously underreported their deaths.
When it comes testing, India lags behind the US by a huge margin.
The US has conducted 1.4 million tests per million population while the same figure for India stands at 2.28 lakh.
Moreover, India's positivity rate — percentage of Covid positive cases out of total samples tested — stood at 18.17% on May 17. While this is an improvement from last week, the WHO has recommended 5% positivity rate as the threshold for relaxing restrictions.
Bearing the brunt
The US share of the global Covid caseload stands at 20.5% while India's share is at 15.3%. Cumulatively, the two hardest-hit nations account for over 1/3rd of all global infections so far.
However, during their respective second wave peaks, these figures were much higher.

In the week leading up to its peak of 3,00,300 cases on January 2 this year, the US on average accounted for 36% of all the cases being reported around the world.

Whereas, India on average accounted for nearly half of all the global cases in the week leading up to its peak of 4.14 lakh infections on May 7.
This indicates that the global surge in the last few weeks was heavily fueled by India's second Covid wave.
Maharashtra 5th worst-hit 'country'

Meanwhile, India's Covid caseload is dominated by Maharashtra, which accounts for over 1/5th of total cases so far.
As per the latest figures, Maharashtra has reported over 5.4 million (54 lakh) Covid cases since the outbreak last year.
If it were a country, Maharashtra would have been the fifth worst-hit in the world after US, India, Brazil and France and ahead of Turkey and Russia.
Overall, the map shows that the ten worst-hit states have heavily dominated India's Covid landscape, accounting for nearly 75% of all the cases.
Glimmer of hope
Despite the grim figures, the steady decline in cases over the last week has offered a ray of hope in India's long and arduous battle against the virus.
India on Tuesday reported over 4 lakh recoveries while new cases fell further to 2.6 lakh. This was a net decline of over 1.63 cases in the country's active caseload over the last 24 hours.

The national recovery rate has now further improved to 85.6% with more people recovering than getting tested Covid positive over the last few days.