(New Delhi) More than half of the inhabitants of the slums of Bombay, in western India, appear to have had the coronavirus, according to a study commissioned by the city and released on Tuesday, which casts doubt on it on official contamination figures in the country.
Posted on 28 July 2020 to 18 h 07
France Media Agency
India is already the third most affected country in the world after the United States and Brazil, with nearly 1.5 million cases. Experts have already warned that due to the shortage of tests, the real figure could be much higher.
Blood tests conducted by authorities in Bombay on 6936 randomly selected people showed that 57% of slum dwellers and 13% of residents of other neighborhoods had antibodies.
Bombay, of which some 28% of the population lives in slums, recorded a little more than 110 00 contaminations and more than 6000 dead for the moment.
The city of 19 million inhabitants is home to India's largest slum, Dharavi, with an estimated population of one million people.
But the deaths in this sprawling neighborhood have not exploded, with local officials ensuring their firm initiatives to prevent the spread of COVID – 18 were effective.
The test results suggest that asymptomatic contaminations could “represent a significant proportion of contaminations” and that the death rate of the virus seems “very low”, the study indicates.
This information is released a week after a similar government study according to which almost a quarter of the inhabitants of the capital New Delhi, which also counts 19 millions of inhabitants, have contracted the coronavirus.
