More than a quarter of New Delhi’s other 20 million people may have caught the new coronavirus without symptoms appearing, a review published Thursday said, raised further doubts about official case figures in India.
Extrapolated, antibody testing on 15,000 inhabitants means that another 5.8 million people in the bustling capital may have caught the virus, more than 37 times the official count of 156,139 infections.
India is already officially the third most affected country after the United States and Brazil, and the Ministry of Health on Wednesday reported a record increase of 69,652 new infections, bringing the total to 2.84 million.
On Thursday, Delhi’s fitness minister Satyendra Jain said blood tests on 15,000 citizens before this month that 29.1% of them had anti-virus antibodies.
However, scientists say antibody tests should be treated with caution, as they are also run into other coronaviruses, not just newer COVID-19.
A fitness employee dressed in a non-public protective apparatus (EPI) takes a swab from a migrant employee, who has returned to Delhi from the state of his home, for immediate antigen control at a bus terminal, amid the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) in New Delhi, India, 17 August 2020 (Reuters)