NEW DELHI / BENGALURU (Reuters) – India on Thursday reported a record 200,000 new COVID-19 cases and closed down Mumbai’s financial hub as many hospitals treating coronavirus patients reported severe shortages of beds and oxygen supplies.
The surge was the seventh record daily increase in the past eight days and comes as India battles a massive second wave of infections, centered in the economically important state of Maharashtra, home of Mumbai. The western state is responsible for about a quarter of the country’s total affairs.
India has reported 200,739 COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, according to data from the Ministry of Health released on Thursday. Deaths stood at 1,038, taking the total to 173,123.
The total business tax reached 14.1 million, just second to the United States, leading the global score by 31.4 million cases.
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(Graphic: COVID-19 cases in major Indian cities 🙂
(Graph: daily business tax in India 🙂
Hospitals and doctors in Maharashtra as well as other regions, including Gujarat and Delhi in the north, have reported chaotic scenes as healthcare facilities are overwhelmed with the increase in admissions of COVID-19 patients.
“The situation is dire. We are a hospital with 900 beds, but there are about 60 patients waiting and we do not have room for that, ”said Avinash Gawande, an official at the Government Medical College and Hospital in Nagpur, a commercial center in Maharashtra.
Hospitals in other places, including Gujarat, the homeland of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have reported oxygen deficiencies. “If such conditions continue, the death toll will rise,” the head of a medical body in Ahmedabad said in a letter to Gujarat minister.
The Indian government has said that the country has been producing oxygen every day for the past two days and that it has increased production.
“Along with the increased production of oxygen production units and the available surplus stock, the current availability of oxygen is adequate,” the health ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims gathered on Wednesday after a religious festival in the north of the country, expressing fear of a new increase in COVID-19 cases in the region.
Also in the capital Delhi, daily COVID-19 cases are setting new records, and doctors warn that the boom could be more deadly than in 2020.
“This virus is more contagious and virulent …. We have 35-year-olds with pneumonia in intensive care, which did not happen last year,” said Dhiren Gupta, a pediatrician at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi. , said. “The situation is chaotic.”
Reporting by Neha Arora in New Delhi; Additional reporting by Rama Venkat in Bengaluru and Sumit Khanna in Ahmedabad; Written by Sachin Ravikumar; Edited by Shri Navaratnam and Lincoln Feast.