Rural India: Covid deaths rising faster than cases

The news from the hinterland is not all good with fatalities increasing faster than infections. Rural and semi-urban districts now account for 27% of all deaths, up from 25% two months ago. In contrast, the share of infections has fallen from 38% to 36%.

In the past month, infections in urban India increased 1.2 times while they went up by 1.16 times in rural India. Again, fatalities in rural districts increased 1.2 times compared with 1.14 times for urban districts.

One reason for the higher share of deaths in rural areas could be the limited availability of medical facilities. There is just one functioning primary healthcare centre (PHC) for every 64,800 persons and one PHC doctor for every 38,000.

Till Sunday, India had recorded 9.1 million infections. The country does not classify districts as rural or urban, so we have classified any district with more than a 30% urban population share as ‘urban’ – in keeping with the average urban-rural share for the country – and one that has around 20-30% urban population as ‘semi-urban’; the rest as ‘rural’.