India found its first case of COVID-19 on January 30 in Kerala. Its been almost one year now and the virus has spread all over the country. But the fear of catching the virus has mostly diminished over the period. Many people lost their lives in saving others, went out of their way to help the migrant labourers, while others brought groceries for the elderly in their vicinity. We all tried our best to help someone in need.
The Bridge Chronicle takes a look at how COVID-19 spread throughout the nation.
In January, India had as little as one case and two cases till February end. As soon as the entire nation went under a complete lockdown in March, COVID-19 casualties started to spike tremendously.
As we can see in the graph, the cases spiked excessively till September. September recorded the highest number of monthly cases with 26,21,418 people testing positive for the novel coronavirus.
The government and the citizens expected the cases to rise with the upcoming winter season. But, on the contrary, the COVID-19 numbers started to decrease after September. Last month, in December, India only recorded 8,03,865 positive cases of COVID-19.
The reported number of deaths followed a similar trajectory. September saw the maximum number of death with 33,390 people succumbed to the disease.
There were many questions raised at the central government for not increasing the number of tests per day. Later, questions arose on the efficacy of the test kits. But slowly and steadily, India did manage to increase the number of tests over time. For obvious reasons, if the number of tests per day increased a bit earlier, chances of containing the virus would have also increased.
In September, almost 54 people out of 1,000 were getting tested. This number increased two-fold in December, with over 125 people out of 1000 people getting tested every day.
India was under a complete lockdown for about two months, but still, the government failed to build proper medical infrastructure for the COVID patients. Some people lost their lives just because they couldn't get timely medical treatment.
Many nations have already started with the first phase of vaccination. But, India has just approved COVID vaccine and started conducting dry run in various states.
Data from Ourworldindata.org