By about 3:30 pm (IST) on April 14, the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases neared 2 million

around the world, and deaths were about to exceed the 120,500 mark. But as if by a miracle, the
number of confirmed cases in India was just about 10,540, per official figures. Scepticism about this
unexpectedly low figure is often met with the refrain that it is thanks to containment efforts, although
the virus’s spread could have started in January itself.

The drastic limiting of social contacts and the nationwide lockdown may have played their intended
purpose – but they couldn’t have been adequate. Physical distancing norms and the nationwide
lockdown from March 25 were imposed unevenly across states, and the massive social and economic
disruption that followed couldn’t have helped.

This said, there are no known reasons for why the disease’s rate of spread appears to be lower in India.
Even so, it is difficult not to be sceptical of the official data. If we assume that the disease is nearly as
infectious as it seems to be in other geographies, why are the reported numbers so low? Is the actual
incidence not being captured in the data? Are there bottlenecks in the data-flow? Are there flaws in the
effort to assess the disease’s prevalence? Or are there other factors at work that obscure India’s efforts
to accurately determine the disease spread?

India’s pre-lockdown data

A Flourish chart

No airport-screening system can detect all infected persons. Until March 25, 2020, almost all of India’s
confirmed cases were related to air travel. A comparison of the airport traffic data and the cases
detected at airports points to large anomalies in the airport-screening programme and which can’t be
explained by minor variations.

On March 24, before the nationwide lockdown, India had 519 confirmed cases. Of this, if we take the
relative share of state-wise confirmed cases and compare them to air-passenger traffic through all
airports in each state (data of FY 2017-18), the discrepancies in airport-screening strategy will become
clear (see figure 1).

Delhi had 6% of the confirmed cases and accounted for 22% of passengers. West Bengal, Tamil Nadu
and Karnataka together accounted for 12% of confirmed cases and accounted for about 28% of
passengers. In contrast, Kerala accounted for 18% of confirmed cases but only 6% of passenger traffic.
This lack of pattern shows up the big differences in the effectiveness of airport-based screening and
contact-tracing. It also underscores the possibility that there are several times the number of
undetected cases as there are already detected cases, contributing to the disease’s spread.

A scientific paper published on February 24 shows that even in the best-