NEW DELHI (AP) – The world’s fastest growing rate of infection and the highest daily increase in coronavirus cases are pushing India towards a deeper and deadlier health crisis.
India is massive (it is the second most populous country in the world with close to 1.4 billion people) and its size presents extraordinary challenges to fight COVID-19.
About 2.7 million daily doses of vaccine are given daily, but it is still less than 10% of people who have received the first vaccine. In general, India has confirmed 15.9 million cases of infection, the second highest after the United States, and 184,657 deaths.
The latest wave has driven India’s fragile health systems to the breaking point: Hospitals with few staff are overflowing with patients. Medical oxygen is scarce. Intensive care units are full. Almost all fans are used and the dead are piled up in crematoria and cemeteries.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Authorities believed the worst was behind it when cases began to recede in September.
Cases fell for 30 consecutive weeks before rising in mid-February, and experts say the country did not seize the opportunity to increase health infrastructure and aggressively vaccinate.
“We were so close to success,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, a University of Michigan biostatistician who has been tracking India’s pandemic.
Despite warnings and advice on the need for precautions, authorities were unprepared for the magnitude of the increase, said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.
Critics have noted that the government decided not to stop religious festivals or Hindu elections, and experts say these may have exacerbated the increase.
“Authorities across India, without exception, put public health priorities at the bottom,” Reddy said.
As a result, India’s daily confirmed 7-day rotating average has increased in the past two weeks, from 6.75 new cases per 100,000 people on April 6 to 18.04 new cases per 100,000 people on April 20, possibly driven by new variants of the virus, including one first detected in India, experts say.
India’s top health official, Rajesh Bhushan, will not speculate on Wednesday why the authorities could have been better prepared and said: “Today is not the time to look at why we have missed or lost, we have ready? “
WHY IS INDIA’S HEALTH SYSTEM COLLAPSING?
India spends only a fraction of its gross domestic product on its health system, which is lower than most major economies.
When the virus took over last year, India imposed a tough blockade across the country for months to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. This brought terrible difficulties to millions, but also gained time to implement measures to cover critical shortcomings, such as hiring additional health workers on short-term contracts, establishing field hospitals, and installing hospital beds in banquet halls.
But authorities did not have a long-term view of the pandemic, said Dr. Vineeta Bal, who studies immune systems at the Indian Institute of Education and Scientific Research in the city of Pune.
Suggestions for permanent improvements, such as adding capacity to existing hospitals or hiring more epidemiologists to help track the virus, were widely ignored, he said. Authorities are now stepping up to revive many emergency measures that had ended once the figures fell.
A year ago, India was able to avoid the medical oxygen shortage that afflicted Latin America and Africa after converting industrial oxygen manufacturing systems into a medical quality network.
But many facilities went back to supplying oxygen to industries and now several states in India are facing such shortage that the Ministry of Health has urged hospitals to implement rationing.
The government, in October, began building new plants to produce medical oxygen, but now, about six months later, it is still unclear if any were online, and the health ministry said. that they were “being closely reviewed to finish them sooner”.
Oxygen tanks are being transported across the country to hot spots to keep up with demand, and several state governments have alleged that many others have been intercepted by other en route states to use them for meet local needs.
WHAT CAME UP?
India faces the massive challenge of trying to prevent its healthcare system from collapsing further until enough people can be vaccinated to significantly reduce patient flow.
The good news is that India is a major producer of vaccines, but even after stopping large exports of vaccines in March to divert them to domestic use, there are still doubts about whether manufacturers can produce fast enough.
“Vaccination is a way to slow the spread, but that really depends on the speed and availability of the shots,” Reddy of the Public Health Foundation said.
Several states have already said they have a shortage of vaccines, although the federal government denies it.
India said last week that it would allow the use of all COVID-19 shots that have been lit by the World Health Organization or regulators in the United States, Europe, Britain or Japan.
On Monday, he said he would soon expand his 45-year-old vaccination program to include all adults, some 900 million people, far more than the entire population of the entire European Union and the United States combined.
Meanwhile, Reddy said some states have had to implement new blockades, but in the long run it was also up to people to do their part.
“As a society, it is crucial that we maintain public health measures such as masking, physical distancing and avoiding crowds,” he said.
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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.