Karan Thapar
Journalist, television commentator and interviewer.
In an exclusive 50-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Dr Ramanan Laxminarayan said that he found it hard to believe the health ministry’s official figure which, on their website at 12 pm on March 18th, said India had 130 people with COVID-19 in addition to the 14 who had recovered and three who had died. He says if the UK could accept that they have underestimated the number infected by a factor of 12, at the very least the situation would be the same in India. That means there are over 1,500 undetected cases. In fact, given our size and population density, Dr Laxminarayan estimates that India is bound to have 10,000 or more undetected novel coronavirus cases.