In about than six months since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be a public health emergency of international concern, the virus has consistently followed an upward trajectory and spread to over 200 countries and territories worldwide.
Since February this year, the novel coronavirus has infected over 14.5 million people and more than 6,00,000 deaths have been reported till July 19.
However, even with ever-increasing international case load, the epicentre of the pandemic has shifted across continents and countries over time.
At first, a majority of the infections were limited to just China. By early March, European countries accounted for most of the daily increase as well as overall global cases before the epicentre shifted to the Americas, particularly the United States.
India reported over 40,000 confirmed cases on Sunday in its biggest single-day spike since the onset of the pandemic, making up for nearly 19 of every 100 globally confirmed cases for the day.
With over 11 lakh cases, India is the third worst-affected country in terms of confirmed COVID-19 infections after the US and Brazil and its share in the daily new cases of the disease has increased from less than 10 per cent at the start of July to 18.84 per cent.
During the same time, Brazil’s share in daily new cases has almost halved from more than 21 per cent to just under 11 per cent. As overall reported new cases have hovered around 2,00,000 every day, the growth in international case load has largely been driven by a handful of countries over the past three weeks including South Africa, India, and the United States whose share in daily hikes has gone up from 23.5 per cent to roughly 29 per cent due to a second wave of infections.
Collectively, the three worst-affected nations – the US, Brazil, and India – have accounted for more than half of all the new cases reported daily since June 23. They contributed over 60 per cent of the new cases on six occasions during this period.
India has seen a rapid increase in COVID-19 cases over the past couple of months as the country scaled up testing compared to testing levels in March.
Till early April, when major European countries such as Italy, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom along with Iran and the United States were grappling with an exponential increase in infections and deaths, India was contributing less than one percent of the daily new cases globally.
However, it changed by the end of May as Europe relatively contained the spread of the virus abd by that time, India accounted for 6-8 per cent of the new confirmed cases.
Meanwhile, cases in India during that time were also increasing in absolute numbers. Therefore, the increase in its share in new cases globally was not just due to declining share of European countries.
By late June, India’s share in new cases touched double-digits which further rose to the current levels.
China’s share has remained almost negligible in daily new cases since mid-March. It has also not reported any new case of COVID-19 for past three days.
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