Burden of COVID-19 pandemic in India: Perspectives from Health Infrastructure

  1. Harihar Sahoo
  2. Chaitali Mandal
  3. Suyash Mishra
  4. Snigdha Banerjee

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Abstract

The coronavirus (COVID-19) is spreading rapidly across the country but India’s testing regime is far from the global standards. It is important to identify the states where testing needs expansion and the magnitudes of active COVID cases are higher focusing on current health infrastructure to meet the pandemic. The data on COVID-19 was extracted from the Application Programming Interface. Test positive rate, test per confirmed case, recovery rate, case fatality rate, and percent distribution of active cases were computed. Availability of hospitals, hospital beds, intensive care unit and ventilators per lakh population was also computed by public and private sector. The result revealed that, Maharashtra constitutes more than one-third positive cases in the country. More than a quarter of the active cases in India belonged to the Mumbai district of Maharashtra, followed by the Chennai district (9.4%) and Ahmedabad district (9.1%). Further, about 40 percent of the active cases in India belonged to the 11 districts of Maharashtra. The increased test positive rate in Maharashtra and Gujarat to almost double in last one month is a concern. In order to bring the states and the country in right track, the test positive rate need to be brought down to below 2 percent. The procurement of higher number of high throughput machine, the Cobas 6800 testing machine, is need of the hour. Only few states have adequate health infrastructure. The priority should be the laid on expansion of more laboratories and hospitals, storage of PPE kit, testing kit, and indigenously developed vaccines.

Highlights

  • Maharashtra is having the highest number of positive cases followed by Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. Maharashtra constitutes more than one-third positive cases in the country, but the test per confirmed cases (8) is much lower than the other states.

  • More than a quarter of the active cases in India belonged to the Mumbai district (26.1%) of Maharashtra, followed by the Chennai district (9.4%) and Ahmedabad district (9.1%). Further, about 40 percent of the active cases in India belonged to the 11 districts of Maharashtra.

  • The test positive rate is higher in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Delhi is a concern.

  • The recovery rate in India increased substantially by 26.5 percent point from 11.9 percent on April 14 to 38.4 percent on May 17, 2020.

  • The case fatality rate of Covid-19 in India declined by 0.2 percent from 3.4 percent on April 14 to 3.2 percent on May 17 in India.

  • The number of Dedicated Covid Hospitals is not sufficient in India.

  • The available ventilators in the country will deficit in near future to cater to a growing number of active Covid-19 patients and the burden of other communicable and non-communicable diseases.

  • India has only 569 testing laboratories (396 govt. and 173 private) against its 1.35 billion population. The procurement of higher number of high throughput machine, the Cobas 6800 testing machine, is need of the hour.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.26.20113456: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.26.20113456v1 on medRxiv