India on Thursday recorded the world’s highest daily figure of 314,835 new COVID-19 infections, as a second wave of pandemic raised new fears about the ability to cope with collapsing health services.
Health officials in northern and western India, including the capital, New Delhi, said they were in crisis, with most hospitals full and without oxygen.
Some doctors advised patients to stay home, while a crematorium in the eastern city of Muzaffarpur said he was overwhelmed with bodies and that distressed families had to wait their turn.
“Right now there are no beds, no oxygen. Everything else is secondary,” Shahid Jameel, a virologist and director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University, told Reuters.
“The infrastructure is collapsing.”
Some hospitals in New Delhi had run out of oxygen and authorities in neighboring states stopped bringing supplies to the capital to save them for their own needs, city deputy prime minister Manish Sisodia said.
“It could be difficult for hospitals here to save lives,” Sisodia said in a televised speech.
India’s total cases now stand at 15.93 million, while deaths rose by 2,104 to 184,657, according to the latest data from the health ministry.
The United States, which registered 297,430 new cases on a January day, recorded the record one-day increase in cases, although its count has fallen sharply.
The television showed images of people with empty oxygen cylinders crowding into the recharging facilities as they hurried to save relatives at the hospital.
In the western city of Ahmedabad, a man tied to an oxygen tank was in the back of a car in front of a hospital while waiting for a bed, according to a Reuters image.
“We never thought a second wave would hit us so hard,” Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, executive chairman of healthcare company Biocon & Biocon Biologics, wrote in the Economic Times.
“The complacency caused an unforeseen shortage of medicines, medical supplies and hospital beds.”
Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said there was a shortage of intensive care beds, and the city needed about 5,000 more than it could find.
“We can’t call this a comfortable situation,” he told reporters.
Similar increases in infections elsewhere in the world, in South America in particular, threaten to overwhelm other health services. Read more
India has launched a vaccination program, but only a small fraction of the population has been shot.
Authorities have announced that vaccines will be available to all over the age of 18 from May 1, but India will not have enough shots for the 600 million people who will be eligible, experts say.
Health experts said India had lowered its guard when the virus appeared to be under control during the winter, when new daily cases were around 10,000, and lifted restrictions to allow large meetings.
Some experts say the new, more infectious virus variants, particularly a “double mutant” variant that originated in India, are primarily responsible for the rise in cases, but many also blame politicians.
“The second wave is a consequence of complacency and mixing and mass gatherings. You don’t need a variant to explain the second wave,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi.
The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered an extensive closure in the early stages of the pandemic, but has been wary of the economic costs of tougher restrictions.
In recent weeks, the government has come under criticism for holding political rallies for local elections and allowing a Hindu festival in which millions of people gathered.
This week, Modi urged state governments to use closures as a last resort. He asked people to stay inside and said the government was working to increase the supply of oxygen and vaccines.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health and Science Security, said the situation in India was “heartbreaking and horrible.”
“It’s the result of a complex mix of bad policy decisions, bad advice to justify those decisions, global and national policies, and a lot of other complex variables,” he said on Twitter.
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