Many European nations using low deaths per day as indicator to relax lockdown

New Delhi: Many countries in Europe, including Italy, Spain and the UK are using deaths per day as an indicator to relax the lockdown, says Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), whose data on the utility of the lockdown saving nearly 78,183 lives was used by the Indian Statistical Institute.

Professor K. Srinath Reddy, president PHFI said: "Many countries in Europe are focusing on the number of deaths per day as an indicator to relax the lockdown. For the first time deaths per day is coming down and consistently going down that indicates the overall objective is to try and contain deaths in the population."

He insisted that deaths-per-million is also a good indicator to understand whether measures implemented are resulting in control of the Covid-19 epidemic.

According to data shared by the Health Ministry, deaths-per-million in India is 3.2 -- extremely low in comparison with many developed countries in Europe, the UK and the US. And, deaths per million for the whole population gives a combined measure of both the containment and case management success, he added

Queried on nearly 7,000 cases on May 25 and more than 5,000 cases daily in the past one week and over 100 deaths daily, Reddy said it is the effect of greater spread within the hot urban zones as well as ramped up testing rates which yield a greater case count than more limited testing does. "Deaths usually occur 10-15 days after infection. So, today's deaths reflect new infections of a fortnight ago. Both the rising case counts and death rates are a matter of concern. However, the overall death rate (deaths per million populations) is still much lower than in most countries," he added.

The total tally of Covid-19 cases in India touched 1,51,767. Of the total cases so far 83,004 are active, while 64,425 people have been cured and 4,337 have died till Wednesday. In the past 24 hours at least 3,935 people have also been cured.

Reddy added it is also important to look at the number of tests performed every day, and the number of new cases detected through these tests. "It will help to identify whether the rate of infection is coming down or not," said Reddy. He insisted that syndromic surveillance should be carried out by healthcare workers on a weekly basis to find out the prevalence of influenza-like illness.

Reddy reiterated that the public health objective is to reduce the number of deaths. "How did India do in the whole epidemic, we will have to look back at the number of deaths that occurred in India compared to other countries," he added.

On India's response on Covid-19 crisis, he added that given that the whole world was struggling to understand the behaviour of this new virus, India responded fairly well through early initiation of containment measures.