COVID-19 management: UP, Bihar win; Maharashtra, Delhi fail

India has done a pretty good job in handling the coronavirus crisis, a new report by SBI Research has said. The data was derived from 20 major states considering coronavirus cases from April-September 2020. The SBI research used a 'bottom-up approach' to arrive at the conclusion.

Under the bottom-up method of adjusting population and juxtaposing it with Indian states to see how India has done in terms of controlling COVID, a two-stage least square (2SLS) panel model with 20-major states considering the monthly data was tested.

Also read: Coronavirus in India: Recovery rate crosses 79 lakh, active case count shrinks to 5 lakh

"In this 2SLS regression, we first regressed the state-wise test data on the population to gauge the number of tests that should have been ideally done given the population difference across Indian states," the report authored by Soumya Kanti Ghosh, SBI Research's chief economic adviser, said.

The SBI Research note said the results indicate that for India, the estimated number of cases is 84.49 lakh, which is 2.65 lakh higher than the actual confirmed cases of 81.8 lakh, thus indicating India has done a good job on controlling the spread of the virus. However, state-wise numbers vary widely.

"States including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Delhi and Tamil Nadu have done badly in managing the pandemic, with estimated cases lower than the actual cases," the report added.

Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat and Jharkhand among others managed the situation "quite well" with estimated cases more than their actual cases, it said. India reached its COVID peak on 16 Sep'20. The daily new cases have declined since then and are now moving around 50,000, while the daily recoveries are higher than new cases.

Also read: COVID-19 crisis: US first nation to exceed 10 million cases; global infections cross 50 million