Half of Mumbai's slum residents have had coronavirus: study

Over half the people living in the slums of Mumbai have had the coronavirus.

NEW DELHI (AFP) - Over half the people living in the slums of Mumbai have had the coronavirus, according to a city-commissioned study released Tuesday that raises fresh doubts about India s official case numbers.

India is already the third worst-hit country after the US and Brazil, with nearly 1.5 million cases though experts have previously said the lack of testing could mean the true tally is much higher.

Blood tests on 6,936 randomly selected people conducted by Mumbai s city authorities found that 57 percent of slum-dwellers and 16 percent of non-slum residents had virus antibodies.

Mumbai, where about 40 percent of the population lives in slums, has reported just over 110,000 infections and more than 6,000 deaths so far.

The western city of 20 million people is home to India s largest slum Dharavi, where an estimated one million people live.

But deaths in the sprawling slum have not exploded, with local officials saying their aggressive efforts to stem the spread of the virus has been effective.

The survey results suggested asymptomatic infections were "likely to be a high proportion of all infections" and also indicated the virus death rate was likely to be "very low", the study said.

The Mumbai survey came a week after an antibody study commissioned by the government suggested that almost a quarter of people in the capital New Delhi, home to 20 million people, have had the virus.

On the other hand, the novel coronavirus has killed at least 662,481 people since the outbreak emerged in China last December, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP on Tuesday.

At least 16,883,789 cases of coronavirus have been registered in 196 countries and territories. Of these, at least 10,450,932 are now considered recovered.

The tallies, using data collected by AFP from national authorities and information from the World Health Organization (WHO), probably reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections.

Many countries are testing only symptomatic or the most serious cases.

On Tuesday, 5,567 new deaths and 247,577 new cases were recorded worldwide. Based on latest reports, the countries with the most new deaths were United States with 1,245 new deaths, followed by Brazil with 955 and India with 776.

The United States is the worst-hit country with 148,056 deaths from 4,294,770 cases. At least 1,325,804 people have been declared recovered.

After the US, the hardest-hit countries are Brazil with 87,618 deaths from 2,442,375 cases, the United Kingdom with 45,759 deaths from 300,111 cases, Mexico with 44,022 deaths from 395,489 cases, and Italy with 35,112 deaths from 246,286 cases.

The country with the highest number of deaths compared to its population is Belgium with 85 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by the United Kingdom (67), Spain 61, Italy 58, and Sweden 56.

China -- excluding Hong Kong and Macau -- has to date declared 83,959 cases (68 new since Monday), including 4,634 deaths and 78,934 recoveries.

Europe overall has 208,412 deaths from 3,096,971 cases, Latin America and the Caribbean 185,993 deaths from 4,445,706 infections, the United States and Canada 156,975 deaths from 4,408,681 cases, Asia 58,743 deaths from 2,576,309 cases, Middle East 25,983 deaths from 1,107,841 cases, Africa 18,173 deaths from 861,970 cases, and Oceania 198 deaths from 17,029 cases.

As a result of corrections by national authorities or late publication of data, the figures updated over the past 24 hours may not correspond exactly to the previous day s tallies.