High-level chronic diseases in India, such as diabetes and hypertension, helped sweep the brutal Koronavirus wave that hit the second most populous country in the world during a pandemic, the researchers said.
The findings of one of the few large-scale Covid-19 studies in India showed patients from the southern district of Madurai had a higher risk of death than those in China, Europe, South Korea and the US, although 63% of them were tested not to show symptoms.
Chronic health conditions in the community may have played a role, according to reports published in Lancet.
Over the years India facing an increased insufficient disease crisis as a middle class expanding and leading a more residential and rich lifestyle.
It makes them vulnerable to diseases such as diabetes and heart disease that accounts for almost two-thirds of all deaths in this country.
The existing conditions may allow Coronavirus to do more damage, increase the case and death and have the potential to trigger the collapse of the Indian health system.
The death rate is 5.7% among Covid-19 patients with at least one health condition, compared to 0.7% in those who should be healthy, the researchers found.
Data came from more than 400,000 people undergoing Coronavirus testing known as RT-PCR in Madurai from May 20 to October 31, 2020, during the first wave of India.
“The findings that hypertension and diabetes actually predict the acquisition of Covid itself, or at least tested positively on the RT-PCR test, by itself is a significant finding,” Laxminarayan’s speech, the main author of the research and founder of the Center for Dinamika, Economics & Policy, said in an interview.
“Think of India has half diabetes and hypertension we have, we might see a much smaller impact than the second wave.” Managing health conditions that commonly occurs in the population must be at the top of the list for each government’s response to limit pathogenic victims, he said.
The masses who were not reported by the researchers also highlighted what appeared to be a mass that lacked a Covid case and death in India after assessing the ratio between infection and death, and the number of people in Madurai who had produced infection battles between October 19 and November 5.
The results showed that testing only found 1.4% infection, and only 11% of the number of deaths were expected to be detected.
Also read how big are you Covid in India? Many of the 5 million people may have died after Indian hospitals were overwhelmed during the second wave which peaked in mid-May, a small portion of the total calculation of around 430,000 during the entire pandemic.
The death toll was lower than what was expected given the number of infections known, the researchers said.
Researchers from the state government of Tamil Nadu, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University and Public Health School Johns Hopkins Bloomberg also contributed to this study.
It comes when India prepares for the third covid wave which is expected that some experts will be smaller than the second and can peak in October – blunt in part by the wall of vaccination that grows and naturally get antibodies from past outbreaks.
A national survey in July found that two-thirds of India over the age of six had been exposed to Coronavirus.