Coronavirus latest: India reaches 2 million cases, Thailand to fully open schools
- India has been posting an average of around 50,000 new cases a day since mid-June, but experts say its testing rate at 16,035 per million people is far too low
- The move comes after Thailand went without a local transmission for more than two months
It is the third nation to pass that unwanted milestone, lagging behind only the United States and Brazil. India logged its first one million infections by July 17 and crossed the 1.5 million mark just 12 days after that.
With infections spreading further to smaller towns and rural areas, experts say the epidemic in India is likely to be months away from hitting its peak, putting more strain on an already overburdened health care system. And authorities are having to deal with multiple outbreaks across a nation of 1.3 billion people.
“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.
The health ministry said on Friday there were 62,538 new infections, taking the country’s total to 2.03 million.
India has been posting an average of around 50,000 new cases a day since mid-June, but experts say its testing rate at 16,035 per million people is far too low.