NEW DELHI / BENGALURU (Reuters) – Many Indians rushed to secure beds in hospitals for relatives affected by coronavirus on Thursday as infections reached the daily register, overwhelmed medical facilities and dried up the oxygen supply.
A second massive wave of infections is centered on the rich state of Maharashtra, which accounts for a quarter of the count, and is spreading as doctors and experts blame everything from official complacency to aggressive variants.
The government has blamed widespread failure to adhere to rules on physical distancing and the use of masks.
“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 the neighboring state of Gujarat and northern Delhi.
“We are a 900-bed hospital, but there are about 60 patients waiting and we don’t have room for them.”
Maharashtra, home to the financial capital of Bombay, began a closure at midnight to curb the spread of disease, a move that prompted a rush to store essential items in advance.
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 passed its toll to 173,123.
Its balance of 14.1 million infections is only second in the United States, with 31.4 million.
Despite injecting some 113 million doses of vaccine, the highest figure in the world after the United States and China, India has only covered a small portion of its 1.4 billion people.
Track the pandemic in India: tmsnrt.rs/3tks6Zt
Graph: COVID-19 cases in major Indian cities:
Graph: Daily load of cases in India:
WORDS ORDERED IN NEW DELHI
In the capital, New Delhi, authorities ordered a weekend curfew, placing curbs in shopping malls, gyms, restaurants and some weekly markets.
As infections increased, doctors warned that the increase could be more deadly than last year.
“This virus is more infectious and virulent … We have 35-year-olds with intensive care pneumonia, something that did not happen last year,” said pediatrician Dhiren Gupta, at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital. “The situation is chaotic.”
Outside a major funeral home in the city, weeping relatives gathered in the hot sun to wait 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 over-extended government hospital.
“He died after six or seven hours,” he said. “We have already asked for a refund of our money.”
Oxygen supplies, essential to combat breathing difficulties, 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 state told his chief minister in a letter.
The television broadcast images of a long queue of ambulances carrying virus patients waiting to be admitted to a city hospital that can accommodate more than 1,000.
India produced oxygen at full capacity for each of the last two days, the government said, and increased production.
“Along with accelerated production … and available surplus stocks, current availability is sufficient,” the health ministry said in a statement.
In the northern city of Haridwar, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims had turned up on Wednesday for a Hindu religious festival on the banks of the Ganges River, sparking fears of a new wave.
Reports of Neha Arora and Alasdair Pal in New Delhi; Additional reports from Rama Venkat in Bengaluru and Sumit Khanna in Ahmedabad; Written by Sachin Ravikumar; Edited by Lincoln Feast and Clarence Fernandez