NEW DELHI: India now has more than 500,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, according to government figures released on Saturday that showed a record daily leap of 18,500 new infections.

Authorities said a total of 15,685 people had died after another 385 fatalities were added to the toll in 24 hours.

The pandemic is not expected to peak in India for several more weeks and experts say the number of cases could pass one million before the end of July.

Some state governments are considering imposing new lockdowns. A hard-hitting nationwide lockdown that started March 25 is gradually being eased because of the damage caused to the economy.

The virus has particularly hit India’s densely populated cities and there are now major concerns for New Delhi which has overtaken Mumbai with nearly 80,000 cases.

The city’s government has predicted it will have 500,000 infections by the end of July. It is already using railway carriages to house patients and has taken over hotels and banquet halls to relieve the pressure on hard-pressed hospitals.

The government has been criticised over a lack of testing that experts say has hidden the true number of cases in India, which now stands at 509,000.

The country is currently fourth in the world for the number of infections, behind the United States, Brazil and Russia, though it has a much lower death toll.

In a bid to boost tracing efforts, Delhi authorities have called in 33,000 health workers to screen about two million people in sealed off zones across the city of 20 million people.

But cities across the nation of 1.3 billion people are braced for a huge wave of new cases in coming weeks.

“It is likely that we’re going into a state, unless we are able to reinforce a strict physical distancing mechanism or a hard lockdown, where the rate of infection will continue to increase,” said Anant Bhan, a leading public health expert.

“Unlike China, where the pandemic was relatively more concentrated around Wuhan and a few other cities, India has a more diffused spread that makes it a bit more challenging for the healthcare system,” he said.

Bhan said India might see several peaks in coming months because the spread of the virus “is variable across the country”.

Delhi faces virus challenge

The acting health minister of India’s capital said Saturday that New Delhi is facing a shortage of trained and experienced health care workers, providing a major challenge in a city that is the epicenter of the country’s coronavirus outbreak.

With over 77,000 cases, New Delhi has been hit harder than any other Indian city. Infections had been projected to rise to half a million by the end of July in Delhi, the territory that includes the capital. With the rate of infections slowing down, the number has been revised to 400,000, and Acting Health Minister Manish Sisodia said he was hopeful that it could be less.

But we cant be under any illusions, he said in an interview on Saturday, when India’s total caseload passed half a million. The availability of medical staff is a big challenge that (other) states need to address as well.” Sisodia said that while the shortage of health care workers in New Delhi remains a concern, the situation is not as dire as it once was.

He said that at the start of the outbreak, government hospitals were under enormous strain. But as doctors who were infected with the coronavirus recovered, the shortages became less serious and morale improved.

Still, a shortage of health care workers in New Delhi is significant because it is far richer and has more hospitals than many of the regions in India where the virus is spreading rapidly. New Delhi’s per capita income is three times the national average, according to government data.

Published in Dawn, June 28th, 2020