Recovery conundrum: India shows Covid-19 patients recovering faster

Data shows faster recovery for some states, with Delhi registering a recovery in three days, as against 7 days during the last four months of 2020

Although India's recovery data was always suspect, given the guidelines never specified that a negative test was necessary to declare a patient having recovered from Covid-19, the new rise in infections has further complicated matters.

A BS analysis shows that the recovery time for cases has declined since the last wave. While it took 11 days on average for a person to recover from Covid-19 during the first wave, the country's recovery time on April 12 declined to 9 days.

The recovery time is calculated by subtracting daily recoveries from active cases until the former's sum does not exceed the latter.

For instance, in the case of India, on April 2, the total active infections were 660,000. If we add the daily recoveries since April 3, then over 680,000 people recovered in the next 10 days, which cannot be the case if the number of active infections was lower. Following this formula, we conclude that India's recovery time was 9 days instead, as the sum of daily recoveries was lower than the total active infections on that day.

Running a similar analysis for each of the states shows an odd trend. While 14 states/UTs do not exhibit any change in the recovery time since the last wave, three states have witnessed a slight increase and 19 show a decline from the previous wave.

The recovery time has stayed at 9 days for Punjab, 8 for West Bengal and 8 for Odisha. However, for Delhi it has reduced from 7 days to 3 days. The recovery time has come down from 9 to 7 days for Bihar, and for Gujarat, the same has come down from 12 days to 6. Maharashtra, which was one of the better performers in terms of reporting Covid-19 recoveries accurately—the state had a recovery time of over 14 days in conformity with Covid-19 WHO guidelines—has seen the recovery time decline to 10 days.

Not much can be read into recovery times, as it does not clearly indicate whether the current wave is milder than the first wave or not, and people may still be quarantining for the entire period. What it does show is that India needs to improve the quality of data. Experts highlight that we instead need to focus on the trend of rising infections.

"Those in hospitals are not released without negative RT-PCR tests. For others, most people who are asymptomatic or with mild infection don't even get themselves tested. We are in this situation due to not following Covid appropriate behaviour and a sense of complacency after 5 months of reducing infections. When vaccines became available in India in mid-January, the uptake was poor due to this complacency and concerns about safety and efficacy. Now we have the arduous task of vaccinating on a rising curve. Earlier, it would have been a sensible strategy to vaccinate at scale. Now we will be playing catch up and not very well too," says Shahid Jameel, director, Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University.