Coronavirus: What's the Situation in India?

India has a population that is over 4x that of the United States, and yet per Worldometer, India has far fewer total cases than we do. In fact, the United States is near all time highs in daily cases while India's cases have been in decline since September. What are some of the reasons given for why this is happening?

Reuters (Dec 18) reports: 

“If infections were surging, we would have seen the number of patients in hospitals go up, especially after the festival season. That has not happened,” said Raman Gangakhedkar, who until recently headed epidemiology at the Indian Council Of Medical Research.

A government-appointed panel tasked with making projections based on a mathematical model has estimated that 60% of India’s 1.35 billion people have already been infected with the virus.

That would indicate that over 800 million Indians already came down with COVID-19. Does that even make sense considering that officially only around 152,000 people have died due to COVID-19? This virus kills the elderly more than the young and India does have a young population of 28.4 compared to the United States at 38.4. Per Worldometer the deaths per million in India stands at 109 vs 1,186 in the United States. Does age really impact deaths to that degree? Let's look at Mexico which has an average age of 29.2, but has deaths per million of 1,056. If 60% of the population got infected, one would have to think that deaths per million would be well above 109. There is either some serious undercounting going on in terms of deaths or that 60% is just not realistic. Of course, perhaps they've figured out a way to better prevent those who come down with COVID-19 from getting seriously ill.

BBC via Yahoo (Dec 4) reports:

India had been using the what's known as a PCR test - regarded as the gold standard of testing - very widely.

But currently, only 60% of all tests use this method, and many Indian states - who are in charge of their own health policies - have switched to rapid antigen testing (RAT), a faster but less reliable method.

RAT tests are known to miss up to 50% of cases due to false negatives (where infected people are not detected), although some experts believe they are still useful in areas which have become virus hotspots.

BBC is assuming that maybe there are just a lot of infections out there that just aren't being caught. I guess by default that implies that their downward curve in daily cases isn't showing the real situation on the ground. But back up to the Reuters quote, if this were true, hospitals would be seeing high number of patients, which they aren't.

The situation in India just seems to be at odds with what is happening in Europe, North and South America. The country doesn't have the virus under control like say Australia, China and New Zealand. And they don't have the unusual low case counts that we see in many African countries. So what is happening in India? At the moment, I don't buy either Reuters' or BBC's arguments.

What about the big situation of the vaccine. How is India doing in terms of vaccinating a population of just under 1.4 billion?

CNN (Dec 18) reports:

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has identified 300 million people to receive the first doses of the vaccines. The priority group is made up of 30 million health care workers, policemen, soldiers and volunteers, and 270 million vulnerable people -- mostly citizens above the age of 50 and 10 million others with serious comorbidities.

. . . But India also has its own advantages. As a global hub for vaccine manufacturing, its mass production lines can churn out coronavirus vaccines -- developed either by Western pharmaceutical companies or domestically -- faster and cheaper than most other countries.