NEW DELHI (AP) – Seema Gandotra, a coronavirus patient, breathed a sigh of relief in an ambulance for 10 hours as she tried unsuccessfully at six hospitals in India’s capital to find an open bed. When she was admitted, it was too late and the 51-year-old died hours later.
Rajiv Tiwari, whose oxygen levels began to fall after he tested positive for the virus, has the opposite problem: he identified an open bed, but the 30-year-old Lucknow resident does not get there. “There is no ambulance to take me to the hospital,” he said.
These tragedies are known to rise in other parts of the world, but were largely unknown in India, which was able to prevent a collapse of its health care system last year through a tough closure.. But now they are daily events in the vast country, which is experiencing its biggest pandemic surge to date and seeing its chronically underfunded health system collapse.
Tests are delayed. Medical oxygen is scarce. Hospitals are understaffed and overflowing. Intensive care units are full. Almost all fans are used and the dead are piled up in crematoria and cemeteries. India recorded more than 250,000 new infections and more than 1,700 deaths in the last 24 hours alone and the UK announced this week a travel ban on most visitors to the country. Overall, India has reported more than 15 million cases and about 180,000 deaths, and experts say those numbers are likely to be lower..
The wave of cases in India is contributing to a global rise in infections, as many places are experiencing increasingly deep crises, such as Brazil and France, spurred in part by new, more contagious variants, including one first detected. time in India.. In addition to a year of the pandemic, global deaths have risen from 3 million and are rising again, reaching almost 12,000 a day on average. At the same time, vaccination campaigns have experienced setbacks in many places, and the rise of India has only aggravated that: The country is a major producer of vaccines, but has forced it to delay shootings to focus -se in its domestic demand.
Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who has been tracking India’s pandemic, said India did not learn from the floods elsewhere and did not take anticipatory action.
When the new infections began to subside in September, authorities thought the worst of the pandemic was over. Health Minister Harsh Vardhan even declared in March that the country had entered the “end”, but was already behind the curve: the average weekly cases in the state of Maharashtra, where the Mumbai’s financial capital, had tripled the previous month.
Mukherjee was one of those who had urged authorities to take advantage of low cases earlier this year to speed up vaccinations. Instead, officials were limited to limiting large gatherings during Hindu festivals and refused to delay the ongoing elections in East West Bengal, where experts fear large unmasked crowds at rallies will fuel the spread of the virus.
Now the two largest cities in India have imposed strict closures, the pain of which will fall excessively on the poor. Many have already left major cities, fearing it would be repeated last year, when an abrupt closure forced many migrant workers to walk to their hometowns or risk starvation.
New Delhi, the capital, is rushing to turn schools into hospitals. Field hospitals in affected and abandoned cities are being revived. India is trying to import oxygen and has started diverting oxygen supply from the industry to the healthcare system.
It remains to be seen whether these frantic efforts will suffice. Sanjay Gandhi Hospital, run by the New Delhi government, is increasing its beds for COVID-19 patients from 46 to 160. But R. Meneka, the person in charge who coordinates COVID-19’s response to the hospital, said who was not sure if the facility had the capacity to provide oxygen to so many beds.
Ramesh Verma, who is coordinating the COVID-19 response, said the Burari government hospital, an industrial center on the outskirts of the capitals, had only two days of oxygen on Monday and found that most of the city’s vendors were they had run out.
“Every minute, we keep getting hundreds of calls for beds,” he said.
Kamla Devi, a 71-year-old diabetic, was rushed to a New Delhi hospital when blood sugar levels dropped last week. When he returned home, his levels dropped again, but this time there were no beds. He died before he could get tested for the virus. “Whether you have a crown (virus) or not, it doesn’t matter. Hospitals have no place for you, ”said Dharmendra Kumar, her son.
Laboratories were unprepared for the sharp increase in demand for testing that emerged with the current increase, and everyone was “caught in the pants,” said A. Velumani, president and CEO of Thyrocare, a of the largest private testing laboratories in India. He said the current demand was three times that of last year.
India’s massive vaccination push is also having problems. Several states have marked shortages, although the federal government has stated that there are enough stocks.
India said last week that it would allow the use of all COVID-19 shots which had been enlightened by the World Health Organization or regulators in the United States, Europe, Britain, or Japan. On Monday, he said he would soon expand vaccines to include all adults in the country, about 900 million people. But with the vaccine in short supply worldwide, it is unclear when Indian vaccine manufacturers will have the capacity to achieve these goals. Indian vaccine maker Bharat Biotech said it was increasing to 700 million doses each year.
Meanwhile, Shahid Malik, who works at a small oxygen supplier, said demand for medical oxygen had increased by a factor of 10. His phone has been ringing continuously for two days. On Monday, the store still had oxygen but no cylinders.
He answered every call with the same message: “If you have your own cylinder, come and collect the oxygen. If you don’t, we can’t help you. ”
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Associated Press journalists Biswajeet Banerjee in Lucknow and Krutika Pathi in Bengaluru collaborated.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.