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.
Experts blamed everything from official complacency to aggressive variants. The government blamed widespread failure on the practice of physical distancing and wearing 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 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 to the financial capital of Mumbai, began closing at midnight, a move that prompted a rush to store essential items in advance.
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 wards while doctors overworked. they took care of them, a Reuters witness said.
COVID-positive patients (from a one-and-a-half-year-old child to many seniors) and their families continued to enter the LNJP emergency room, 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 is increasing very quickly, and it is going (at a speed) very fast, so the situation is really alarming, ”said Suresh Kumar, medical director of LNJP.
“We are definitely overwhelmed … Today we have 158 incomes 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 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 about 114 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.
India said on Thursday that regulators would decide emergency use applications for foreign COVID-19 vaccines within three business days as it tries to lure Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna to sell their shots.
Track the pandemic in India: tmsnrt.rs/3tks6Zt
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 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 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 patients.
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.
Reliance Industries, of billionaire Mukesh Ambani, will supply 100 metric tons of additional oxygen to Maharashtra through its refinery in Jamnagar, western India, a state minister said.
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 by Neha Arora, Danish Siddiqui, Sunil Kataria, Alasdair Pal and Krishna Das in New Delhi and Sumit Khanna in Ahmedabad; Additional reports from Rama Venkat and Akshay Lodaya in Bengaluru; Written by Sachin Ravikumar; Edited by Lincoln Feast, Clarence Fernandez and Nick Macfie