NEW DELHI — On Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered 1.3 billion Indians to stay inside their homes for 21 days in an unprecedented bid to stem the spread of the coronavirus in the country.
Soon after the first case of the coronavirus arrived in India in late January, India responded with restrictions on flights and screenings at its airports. Yet the country had more than 80,000 arrivals every day, mostly from Europe and the Gulf States, where the virus had spread. And across the country, millions of people live in proximity, in densely populated slums where access to health care is poor. The government’s decision to impose the lockdown was necessary to mitigate the inevitable spread of the disease.
I have been working with a group of researchers at multiple institutions in India, Europe and the United States to develop a large-scale computer model of the Indian population over many years. As we looked at the situation in India and evidence from other countries, the consequences of a catastrophic situation became more and more apparent.
Studies from China suggest that people with uncontrolled hypertension and diabetes are more likely to experience severe Covid-19 and die from it. About a third of India’s population is hypertensive, and over one in 10 adults are diabetic. Children were less likely to be infected in China, but India has millions of undernourished children, who are more prone to infections.
