But the reality behind India's numbers is more complicated -- and experts caution that it is too early for India to congratulate itself.

"At least in this round, it appears that the virus has not been able to damage as much as been feared," Srinath Reddy, the president of the Public Health Foundation of India, a nonprofit that works on training, research and policy development. "I don't think we can say that we have completely closed the book on this."

How swift were Modi's decisions?

On March 24, Modi announced that the country was going into a three-week lockdown.

The scale of it was unprecedented. India has a population of 1.3 billion, and the only country with a bigger population -- China -- had imposed citywide lockdowns, but never a nationwide one.

By comparison, Italy waited until it had more than 9,200 coronavirus cases before it went into a nationwide lockdown, while the United Kingdom had about 6,700.

Ramanan Laxminarayan, the director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy, a non-profit research organization with offices in Washington, D.C., and New Delhi, said the decision to impose a lockdown promptly, even when case numbers was low, had likely reduced contact rates significantly.

By the time the lockdown was imposed, India had already taken other measures.

On March 11, India suspended all tourist visas, and announced that all travelers who had been in the most-affected areas of the world in the past few weeks would be quarantined for at least 14 days. From March 22, all international commercial flights were banned from landing in India and all passenger train services in the country were suspended.

What if the numbers aren't right?

As with every country, our understanding of the outbreak is only as good as the numbers we have available. And that depends on testing.

When public health experts are assessing how aggressively a country is testing, they don't look at the total numbers alone -- instead, they often look at the country's test positivity rate. If a large proportion of the tests are coming back positive, that suggests that only the most serious cases -- such as those in hospital -- are being tested.

But India's testing rate is extremely low per capita. Only about 48 out of every 100,000 people have been tested, compared with around 1,175 in South Korea and 1,740 in the US.

Samir Saran, the president of the Observer Research Foundation, says India has ramped up its testing capabilities dramatically -- but he's still not happy with the numbers. While other experts say that widespread community testing would be impractical and a waste of resources, Saran says that's something India needs to look at, given it has large swathes of the population who travel between regions for work.

While India may not be testing enough, Reddy says, doctors are probably catching most of the moderate and serious cases. If there was a huge surge in Covid-19 cases that weren't being caught by testing, then hospitals would be crowded with cases and there would be a spike in influenza-like symptoms in the community, he said.

Could more people be dying than we know?

And there's already evidence that some deaths may be flying under the radar. A resident doctor at one of the main government hospitals in Mumbai said last week that when dead bodies were brought into the hospital, they didn't test them for coronavirus, even if they suspected that was how patients died.

"If the personal history shows that the person came in contact with someone who tested positive for the virus, we dispose of the body in the same way that we would for Covid-positive patients," said the doctor, who asked not to be named as they were not authorized to speak to media.

But, experts say, at this stage, it doesn't look like there is a huge flood of coronavirus deaths.

"Even if we are not testing enough and are not discovering enough, there are not enough bodies being piled up in hospitals or in ICUs or in mortuaries ... to suggest we are in the midst of something really dramatic at this stage," said Saran.

Even so, the true count of Covid-19 deaths will only come much later, when we are able to compare statistics from this year with past years, said CCDEP's Laxminarayan.

When did coronavirus take hold?

India's swift policy measures only tell part of the story. Even before India's lockdown, coronavirus was present in the country, the country had reported some coronavirus cases, but not many.

It was around the same time that the UK, France, and Italy also reported their first cases, although their coronavirus outbreaks followed dramatically different trajectories. All three countries now have well over 100,000 coronavirus cases.

Experts still aren't sure why the virus would have shown a different pattern of spread in India.

One possible reason, said Reddy, is that coronavirus may thrive in colder conditions, meaning that it might not spread so efficiently in India, where temperatures are often more than 30 degrees Celsius (96.8 degrees Farenheit).

Another possibility, Reddy said, is that India's population may be less susceptible due to the country's policy of universal Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccination. BCG -- which was developed to fight tuberculosis -- is being studied in clinical trials around the world as a possible way to fight the novel coronavirus.

But for now, more evidence is needed. "We do not know what is the factor that has helped us," Reddy said.

Will a 40-day lockdown be enough?

Even if India's outbreak is comparatively small, it's not yet time for celebration.

There's a huge diversity of opinion about what will happen when India lifts its lockdown on May 3 -- whether cases will then skyrocket, or if the lockdown will have succeeded in restraining numbers.

"A surge is going to happen ... as soon as we go back from the nationwide lockdown. That is my hunch," said Oommen Kurian, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. "India has successfully hit a pause button. But the problem now is we cannot be on pause forever."

The determining factor will likely be what restrictions are still in place when the lockdown lifts. As Reddy put it: "It's not as though tomorrow we declare victory and then we get back to normal."

Experts say that social distancing will need to be maintained, although some states with fewer cases may be able to ease restrictions. Uttar Pradesh -- India's most populous state with 200 million residents -- has extended a ban on public gatherings until the end of June.

Laxminarayan warned that if social distancing and hygiene measures "are not taken seriously, we will have a serious issue that the health system is not equipped to handle."

"This makes the elderly in India particularly vulnerable, as they are far more likely to catch the infection from the second and third generations, on whom the infection will, statistically speaking, only have mild effects," he said.

Even if India does manage to avoid the worst of the virus this time around, there's plenty to be done. The government needs to be working to support the country's informal workforce, who are "underwriting the cost of the lockdown," as Saran puts it. The government needs to strengthen the public health system to prepare for a possible return and resurgence in the winter, said Reddy.

"This is not a one month challenge, this is going to be a 12-month challenge," said Saran. "I think this is a good 18-month examination of how we respond as people, communities, countries, states."