New study of coronavirus cases in India offers some surprises to scientists

With 1.3 billion people jostling for space, India has always been a hospitable environment for infectious diseases of every kind. And the coronavirus has proved to be no exception: The country now has more than six million cases, second only to the United States.

An ambitious study of nearly 85,000 of those cases and nearly 600,000 of their contacts, published Wednesday in the journal Science, offers important insights not just for India, but for other low- and middle-income countries.

Among the surprises: The median hospital stay before death from Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, was five days in India, compared