Lockdown unlikely to contain Covid surge

New Delhi: India extending the nationwide lockdown by nearly three more weeks to May 3 is unlikely to stem the surge in coronavirus infections and economic and humanitarian crisis will exacerbate due to slow response by the government so far, according to Fitch Solutions.

"We at Fitch Solutions have revised down our forecast for India's FY21 (April 2020 to March 2021) real GDP growth to 1.8 per cent, from 4.6 per cent previously," it said in a note on Wednesday.

"The key drivers behind our revision is slow and weak fiscal response and a worsening of the Covid-19 outbreak domestically, which we expect to cause both private consumption and investments to contract," Fitch Solutions said. Noting that the Covid-19 outbreak in India has worsened, it said in a span of about three weeks, confirmed cases in the country have ballooned to over 18,000, and deaths were over 500 as of April 20, from 700 cases and 20 deaths at the end of March.

"Even at these numbers, we believe that India is nowhere near the peak of the infection given its large population of 1.3 billion," it said. "To be sure, according to data compiled by the University of Oxford, India's Covid-19 testing rate is only at about 257 per million people, as compared to 11,159 in the US, 5,539 in the UK, and 10,855 in South Korea," Fitch Solutions noted.

Fitch Solutions said it believes "this will fail to stem the continued surge in infections and also fail to flatten the infection curve." It cited four reasons for its downbeat view, including that carriers of the virus can be asymptomatic, which means that many carriers can go undetected and still spread the virus.

Secondly, large crowds of rural migrant workers have gathered at the transport depots in hopes of getting a ride back to their rural villages upon the announcement of the lockdown extension on April 14, and also back when the lockdown was first announced on March 24.