NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Many hospitals in India were searching for beds and oxygen as COVID-19 infections hit a new daily record on Thursday, with a second wave of infections centered in the rich state of Maharashtra in the west.
India’s total infection count is only second in the United States, with experts blaming everything from official complacency to aggressive variants. The government has accused the lack of practice of physical distancing.
The country has been producing full-capacity oxygen for each of the past two days, but will have to resort to imports, and the health ministry said it planned to import 50,000 metric tons.
“The situation is horrible,” said Avinash Gawande, an official at a government hospital in the industrial city of Nagpur who was battling a flood of patients, as were hospitals in neighboring Gujarat state and New Delhi in the north.
“We are a 900-bed hospital, but there are about 60 patients waiting and we don’t have room for them.”
Maharashtra, home of Bombay’s financial capital, began a closure at midnight on Wednesday, a move that prompted a rush to store essential items ahead. The state, the most industrial in the country, has been hardest hit by the pandemic.
At Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital (LNJP) in New Delhi, the country’s largest facility treating COVID-19 patients, two or three patients were seen sharing single beds in some neighborhoods, a witness said. Reuters.
COVID-positive patients (from a one-and-a-half-year-old child to many elderly) and their relatives continued to enter the emergency room at LNJP, arriving by ambulance, car, or auto-rickshaw throughout the day. .
“Last year we didn’t see such a bad situation either. This time, the number is very high and it is increasing very quickly, at a very fast pace, so the situation is really alarming,” said Suresh Kumar, medical director. of LNJP.
“We are definitely overburdened … Today we have 158 admissions in Lok Nayak alone. All sick patients, all serious patients,” Kumar added.
India has added 200,739 infections in the last 24 hours, according to health ministry data, for a seventh record daily increase in the last eight days, while 1,038 deaths took its toll on 173,123.
Despite injecting the third highest number of vaccines in the world, India has only covered a small portion of its 1.4 billion people.
India said on Thursday that regulators would decide on emergency use applications for foreign COVID-19 vaccines within three business days. India’s ambassador to Moscow said deliveries of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine to India were expected to begin before the end of April, the TASS news agency reported.
WORDS ORDERED IN NEW DELHI
In New Delhi, authorities ordered a weekend curfew, placing curbs in shopping malls, gyms, restaurants and some weekly markets.
Outside a major funeral home in the city, weeping relatives gathered under the hot sun, waiting for the bodies of loved ones to be released.
Forty-year-old Prashant Mehra said he had to pay an agent for preferential treatment before he could admit his 90-year-old grandfather to an overly extended government hospital.
“He died after six or seven hours,” he said.
Oxygen supplies were in short supply in places like Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“If these conditions persist, the death toll will rise,” the head of a medical corps in the industrial city of Ahmedabad told his chief minister in a letter.
Reliance Industries, of billionaire Mukesh Ambani, will supply 100 metric tons of additional oxygen to Maharashtra, a state minister said.
In the northern city of Haridwar, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims gathered on Wednesday for a Hindu religious festival on the banks of the Ganges River, sparking fears of a new wave.
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