Feb 05,2021:Nearly one in five Indians had been infected by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus until December 2020, the third round of the Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR) serological survey has found. This is roughly a three-fold increase since August 2020 and a 30-fold increase since May 2020, when previous rounds of the survey were conducted.
“The message is that a large proportion of the population remains vulnerable. Vaccines are necessary and there can be no complacency with regards to masks, social distancing and hand hygiene,” Dr. Balram Bhargava, Director General, ICMR, said at a press briefing on Thursday.
The survey sampled people from 70 districts across 21 States.
The overall prevalence in the population was 21.5%, which averaged over India’s population indicates that about 270 million may have been exposed to the virus. India has so far confirmed a little over 10 million infections — or 27 cases to each confirmed case of infection. In the previous survey, there were 26 to 31 undetected cases for every confirmed case.
India is showing a declining number in fresh infections since September, with only around 12,899 new infections added on Thursday, and 1.6 lakh active cases. Experts, however, have previously noted that serosurveys don’t capture the extent of the spread, and other modelling studies have shown that as much as 50% of the population may have been exposed.
In the previous survey, only 5.2% of those sampled in rural areas showed antibodies, whereas that figure has now jumped to 19% in the latest survey. There was a sharp rise across urban and non-urban slum areas, too. In urban slums, it was 31%, nearly twice as much as the previous survey findings of 16%. In “urban non slums” the prevalence this time was 26% compared with 9% in the second survey.
About 19.9% of adults sampled in the 18-44 years age group had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies as did 25% of children/teenagers (10-17 years), and 23% in those over 45 years.
