The Indian Ministry of Health said on Thursday that a serious new milestone had been recorded in the coronavirus pandemic. In India, 312,731 new infections were recorded. This is the highest daily number of cases in one country since the virus appeared in China more than a year ago.
The total of India obscured the previous one-day high of 300,669 cases, which occurred on January 8 in the United States, according to a database of the New York Times.
Over the past two months, the outbreak in India has exploded, with reports of superspreader gatherings, oxygen deficiencies and ambulances standing outside hospitals because there are no ventilators for new patients.
As business worldwide reaches new weekly records, 40 percent of infections come from India, a sobering reminder that the pandemic is far from over, even as infections and vaccinations in the United States and other rich parts of the world decline. India surpassed 15.6 million total infections, the second most after the United States.
The death toll also began to climb sharply.
The Indian government recorded 2,104 deaths on Thursday and an average of more than 1,300 people died from the virus every day over the past week. This is less than at the worst points of the pandemic in the United States or Brazil, but it is a strong increase from just two months ago, when less than 100 people in India died daily.
There are signs that the country’s health system, even pale before the pandemic, is collapsing under the tension. At least 22 people were killed in an accident in central Nashik city center on Tuesday when a leak in a hospital’s main oxygen tank reduced oxygen flow to Covid-19 patients.
The picture is incredibly different from early February, when India recorded an average of just 11,000 cases a day, and local medicine companies pumped out millions of vaccine doses. More than 132 million Indians have received at least one dose, but stocks are scarce and experts warn that the country is unlikely to reach its goal of vaccinating 300 million people by summer.
Critics say Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who instituted a hard nationwide shutdown in the early stages of the pandemic in March 2020, could not prepare for a second wave or warn Indians against the virus, especially as more infectious variants begin to spread has. .
Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist government also allowed a massive Hindu festival to take place, attracting millions of pilgrims to the banks of the Ganges River, and his party held political rallies in several states.
“India’s rapid move in this unprecedented crisis is a direct result of complacency and lack of preparation by the government,” Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in Washington, told The New York on Tuesday. Times written.
The region hardest hit is Maharashtra, a populated western state that includes the financial center of Mumbai. On Wednesday, the state’s leading leader ordered government offices to operate at 15 percent capacity and imposed new restrictions on weddings and private transportation to slow the spread of the virus.