The novel coronavirus may have been contracted by more than 60 million people in India, 10 times the official record, the country's lead pandemic agency said on Tuesday, citing a nationwide study calculating antibodies.

India, home to 1.3 billion people, is, according to official statistics, the second most contaminated nation in the world, with more than 6.1 million cases, only behind the United States. Because of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, almost 100,000 Indians have died.
According to the latest serological survey, however, the real figure could be much higher: a study testing blood for certain antibodies to estimate the proportion of a population that has fought the virus.

"The key findings of this sero survey are that by August, one in 15 individuals over 10 years of age had been exposed to SARS-CoV-2," Director General Balram Bhargava of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said at a press conference of the Ministry of Health.

Among people screened in urban slums (15.6 percent) and non-slum urban areas (8.2 percent), Bhargava said evidence of virus exposure was more prevalent than in rural areas, where 4.4 percent of those surveyed had antibodies.
Between mid-August and mid-September, blood samples were obtained from just over 29,000 individuals in 21 states or territories.

The new figures are a sharp jump from the first results of the sero survey, which the ICMR said showed that Could infected about 0.73 percent of adults in India, about six million people.

More infections have been indicated by other antibody studies performed in the capital, New Delhi, and financial hub Mumbai than official numbers claim.

However, scientists warn that antibody tests should be handled with caution since they also pick up exposure to other coronaviruses, not just the one that triggers COVID-19, the disease that has killed more than a million people worldwide since it emerged late last year.

India, which has one of the most poorly supported healthcare systems in the world, has gradually lifted a tight lockdown imposed in late March to revive its ravaged economy, even as infections are steadily increasing.

Source: From AFP