The coronavirus positive cases are now increasing in country’s vast hinterland. After infecting lakhs of people in metro cities like Delhi and Mumbai, rural areas of India got exposed to the deadly virus after migrant workers, who lost their jobs because of COVID-19-induced lockdown, started marching towards their native places.
India has nearly 1.3 billion population and 70 per cent of them live in villages. Despite this fact, these villages have very little access to health care.
States like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam, Odisha, and Jharkhand received the maximum number of migrant labourers and now they are witnessing a sharp increase in the number of COVID-19 cases.
According to a Bloomberg report, these states witness the sharpest rise in the two weeks to June 8. The report said that rural districts of Rajasthan and Karnataka have also seen a spike in the number of positive cases.
According to a report from NITI Aayog, the contagious disease has spread to 98 of India’s 112 poorest rural districts. The figure was just 34 on April 15. Since then, over 2,200 cases were added in those areas.
Poor health care infrastructure in these areas can result in a rise in the number of deaths because of the coronavirus if it is not checked in the rural areas. India is already the fourth worst-hit country in the world and the number can increase exponentially if this goes unchecked in villages.
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According to experts, had the lockdown been imposed in a more stricter way, with migrants workers not being put in a situation where they were forced to leave their urban residence, the problem would not have spread.
The other major cause of concern in these villages is low testing rates. According to the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), so far 6.8 million samples were tested as of June 20.
There are around 4,10,000 coronavirus positive cases and nearly 13,300 deaths have been reported, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
