NEW DELHI (AP) – New Delhi imposed a weekly shutdown on Monday night to prevent the collapse of the Indian capital’s health system, which authorities said had been pushed to the limit amid an explosive rise in coronavirus cases.
In scenes known from waves elsewhere, ambulances catapulted from one hospital to another, trying to find an empty bed over the weekend, while patients lined up outside the medical facilities in waiting to be let in. corpses each. In an effort to combat the crisis, India announced that it would soon expand its vaccination campaign to all adults.
“People continue to arrive, in an almost collapsed situation,” said Dr Suresh Kumar, who heads Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital, one of New Delhi’s largest hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients.
A few months later, India believed it had seen the worst of the pandemic, now the virus is spreading at a faster rate than at any other time, said Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who has been tracking infections in India.
The country is not alone. Several places in the world are experiencing increasingly deep crises, including Brazil and France, spurred in part by new variants. More than a year after the pandemic, deaths are rising again worldwide, averaging nearly 12,000 a day, and there are new cases as well. Over the weekend, the overall death toll exceeded the staggering 3 million.
But the rise has been devastating in India and has weighed heavily on global efforts to end the pandemic. as the country is a major producer of vaccines, but has been forced to delay firing exports abroad, making campaigns in developing countries particularly difficult. As a sign of the large turnouts, the executive chairman of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker, asked U.S. President Joe Biden last week on Twitter. lift the US embargo on the export of raw materials needed to make the shots.
While fighting rising cases, India announced on Monday that it would vaccinate all those over the age of 18 from 1 May. The country began inoculating health workers in mid-January and later extended driving to people over 45. with a population of about 1.4 billion.
The country reported more than 270,000 infections on Monday, its highest daily increase since the pandemic began. It has now recorded more than 15 million infections and more than 178,000 deaths. Experts agree that even these figures are probably undervalued. Amid rising cases, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson canceled a trip to New Delhi.
The city of 29 million people has less than 100 beds with ventilators and less than 150 beds available for patients in need of critical care. Similar strains can be seen in other parts of the vast country, where the fragile health care system has been underfunded for decades and the fact of not preparing for the current rise has left hospitals folded under the pressure of infections.
In the Indian-controlled Himalayan region of Jammu and Kashmir, the weekly average of COVID-19 cases has multiplied by 11 in the last month. In the southern Indian state of Telengana, where the city of Hyderabad is located, where most of the vaccine manufacturers in India are based, the weekly average of infections has multiplied by 16 in l ‘last month.
Meanwhile, election campaigns continue in East West Bengal, in eastern India, amid an alarming rise there as well, and experts fear that mass rallies could fuel the spread of the virus. Top leaders of the ruling Bhartiya Janta party, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have campaigned hard to win votes in the region.
By contrast, in New Delhi, officials have again imposed strict measures. The capital of India closed over the weekend, but now the authorities are extending it for a week: all shops and factories will close, except those that provide essential services such as grocery stores. People are not supposed to leave their homes, except for a handful of reasons, such as seeking medical attention.
They will be allowed to travel to airports or train stations, a difference from the last closure when thousands of migrant workers were forced to walk to their villages of origin.
That hard block last year, which lasted for months, left deep scars. Since then, politicians have been reluctant to mention the word. When similar measures were imposed in the state of Mahrashtra, where the financial capital of Mumbai is located, in recent days, officials refused to call it a blockade. These restrictions must last 15 days.
Kejriwal, the Delhi official, urged calm, especially among migrant workers who suffered especially during the previous shutdown, and said this would be “small”.
But many feared it would mean economic ruin. Amrit Tripathi, a worker in New Delhi, was among the thousands who went home towards the close of last year.
“We will starve to death,” he said, if current measures are extended.
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This story has been updated to correct that the weekly average of COVID-19 cases has multiplied 11 times in the Himalayan region of Jammu and Kashmir in the last month, and not 14 times. It is also corrected that this region is not a state.
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Hussain reported from Srinagar. Associated Press writer Neha Mehrotra contributed to this report.
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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.