India recorded the highest daily count of 314,835 COVID-19 infections on Thursday, while a second wave of the pandemic sparked new fears about the ability of crumbling health services.
Health officials in the North and West Indies, including the capital New Delhi, have said they are in crisis, and most hospitals are full of oxygen.
Doctors in some places advised patients to stay at home, while a crematorium in the eastern city of Muzaffarpur said it was being overwhelmed by bodies and that grieving families had to wait their turn.
“There are currently no beds, no oxygen. All the others are secondary,” Shahid Jameel, a virologist and director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University, told Reuters.
“The infrastructure is crumbling.”
Krutika Kuppalli, assistant professor at the Division of Infectious Diseases, Medical University of South Carolina in the United States, said on Twitter that the crisis was leading to a collapse of the health care system.
The previous record increase in one-day cases was held by the United States, which had 297,430 new cases in one day in January, although the score has fallen sharply since then.
The total number of cases in India now stands at 15.93 million, while the death toll has risen by 2,104 to a total of 184,657, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Health.
Television showed images of people with empty oxygen cylinders crowding perfect facilities as they scrambled to rescue relatives in the hospital.
In the western city of Ahmedabad, a man tied to an oxygen cylinder was lying in the back of a car outside a hospital while waiting for a bed, a photo from Reuters showed.
“We never thought a second wave would hit us like that,” Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, executive chairman of healthcare firm Biocon & Biocon Biologics, wrote in the Economic Times.
“Complacency has led to unexpected shortages of medicine, medical supplies and hospital beds.”
Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said there was a shortage of beds for intensive care units, and the city needed about 5,000 more than he could find. Some hospitals had enough oxygen to last ten hours, others just six.
“We can not call it a comfortable situation,” he told reporters.
Similar increases in infections elsewhere around the world, particularly in South America, threaten to overwhelm other health services. read more
India launched a vaccination process, but only a small fraction of the population had the shots.
Authorities have announced that vaccines will be available to anyone over the age of 18 from May 1, but India will not have enough shots for the 600 million eligible people, experts say.
Health experts said India had let its hats down when it emerged the virus was under control during the winter, when new daily cases were around 10,000, and it lifted restrictions to allow large gatherings.
Some experts believe that new, more contagious virus variants, especially a “double mutant” variant that originated in India, are in many cases responsible for the increase, but many also blame the politicians.
“The second wave is the result of complacency and mixing and mass gatherings. You do not have to have a variant to declare the second wave,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi.
The government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, called for a comprehensive closure in the early stages of the pandemic last year, but was wary of the economic costs of stricter restrictions.
Over the past few weeks, the government has come under fire for holding perfect political rallies for local elections and allowing a Hindu festival where millions gathered.
Modi this week called on state governments to use locks as a last resort. He asked people to stay indoors and said the government is working to increase the supply of oxygen and vaccines.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Center for Global Health and Science Security at Georgetown University, said the situation in India was ‘heartbreaking and horrific’.
“It’s the result of a complex mix of bad policy decisions, bad advice to justify those decisions, global and domestic politics, and a number of other complex variables,” she said on Twitter.
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