Covid Is Deadlier in Brazil Than India and No One Knows Why

When it comes to the scale of infections, the two nations are similarly matched, with cases hovering around 14 million and hospitals from Mumbai to Sao Paulo under increasing pressure as admissions continue to rise.

Facing a sudden surge in coronavirus infections, India is once again home to the world's second-largest outbreak, overtaking Brazil after the latter moved ahead in March. But behind the bleak statistical jockeying is an epidemiological enigma over why the Latin American country has been far more devastated by the pathogen. When it comes to the scale of infections, the two nations are similarly matched, with cases hovering around 14 million and hospitals from Mumbai to Sao Paulo under increasing pressure as admissions continue to rise. But it's the divergence in fatalities that has scientists puzzled. Brazil, home to almost 214 million, has seen more than 365,000 people die from Covid-19, more than double the number of deaths in India, which has a far greater population of 1.4 billion. While deaths in India have started climbing and threaten to get worse, the macro-level disparity remains and is emblematic of different ways in which the pandemic is playing out across regions. Experts say this needs to be better understood and decoded, to contain this global outbreak as well as avoid future public health crises. Covid death ratios in South Asia, including India, are consistently lower than global averages, just as those in Latin America are consistently higher, forcing virologists to offer a number of theories as to why Covid has cut a more deadly swathe from Brazil to Argentina.