The Indian Council of Medical Research reckons that 40% of the Indian population has already been exposed to the COVID-19 virus.
Which doesn’t seem surprising when India is the country with the second highest cases in the world. But what this number also means is that for every confirmed case detected, there are 80-130 missed cases of coronavirus infection, Deccan Chronicle reported.
India currently has 46.6 million COVID-19 cases on record. Multiply that with 80, we would have 372.8 million cases.
In contrast, the US is estimated to have 10 missed cases for every one confirmed case.
The ICMR believes that we missed these many cases because we only tested those with symptoms of severe and acute respiratory infection.
The inaccuracy also means that we have missed a lot of COVID deaths too. So the mortality data remains incomplete as a lot of deaths were not attributed to COVID-19.
The report also says that a cumulative 6,468,388 adult infections were estimated in India by early May.