Doctors say it is only a matter of time before COVID 19 sweeps India
With its densely packed cities and under-funded medical system, India has little margin for error.
Bloomberg: Apr 02, 2020.
It's the phone calls at all hours of the night that he remembers. As swine flu ravaged northern India in 2015, a radiologist working at a hospital in a Delhi suburb said people would call begging for a bed.
That outbreak ultimately infected more than 31,000 people and killed nearly 2,000, as many died waiting for treatment. With the far more infectious novel coronavirus now sweeping the globe ..and threatening to take hold in India -- the doctor, who asked not to be identified criticizing the country’s preparedness to tackle the pandemic, thinks this time will be much worse.
Cases of coronavirus in the world’s second-most populous country have ticked rapidly higher the past week, raising alarm over the ability of India, with its fragile health-care system and battered economy, to handle a virus crisis of the magnitude of China or Italy’s.
While India has seen 56 deaths and just over 2,300 cases, experts fear the real tally could be much much higher and say the disease is already spreading in the community. Authorities say there’s no evidence for this and have not and have not significantly ramped up testing.
In the country’s already stretched hospitals, though, the concern is rising.
Bloomberg, in this report, spoke to more than a dozen front-line physicians across India, and while none reported the sort of spike in patients with respiratory ailments that would suggest COVID-19 is already running rampant, all agreed it’s just a matter of time -- and that India isn’t ready.