NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Many Indian hospitals have been searching for beds and oxygen as COVID-19 infections rose to a new daily record on Thursday, with a second wave of infections centered in the rich western state of Maharashtra.
India’s count of total infections ranks second in the United States, with experts blaming everything, from official complacency to aggressive variants. The government blamed the failure to exercise physical distance.
The country has been producing oxygen at full capacity for the past two days, but will have to turn to imports. The health ministry has said it plans to import 50,000 tonnes.
“The situation is dire,” said Avinash Gawande, an official at a government hospital in the industrial city of Nagpur, which fought a flood of patients, as well as hospitals in the surrounding state of Gujarat and New Delhi in the north. .
“We are a hospital with 900 beds, but there are about 60 patients waiting and we have no place for that.”
Maharashtra, home of the financial capital of Mumbai, began a lockout at midnight on Wednesday, a move that pre-empted the rush for essential items. The state, the country’s most industrialized, was worst affected by the pandemic.
At the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) hospital in New Delhi, the country’s largest institution treating COVID-19 patients, two or three patients were seen in some wards sharing single beds, a Reuters witness said. .
COVID-positive patients – from a one-and-a-half-year-old to many elderly people – and their family members constantly flocked to the emergency department at LNJP and arrived daily by ambulance, car or car rickshaw.
“Last year we also did not see such a bad situation. This time the number is very high and it is increasing very fast, with a very fast speed, so the situation is really disturbing,” said Suresh Kumar, medical director of LNJP, said.
“We are definitely overloaded … Today we have 158 admissions in Lok Nayak alone. All sick patients, all serious patients,” Kumar added.
India has added 200,739 infections in the past 24 hours, health ministry data showed for a seventh daily record rise over the past eight days, while 1,038 deaths claimed its toll to 173,123.
Despite the third largest number of vaccinations worldwide, India covered only a small portion of its 1.4 billion people.
India on Thursday said regulators would decide on emergency COVID-19 vaccine applications within three working days. The Indian ambassador to Moscow said the delivery of the Russian Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine to India was expected to begin before the end of April, the TASS news agency reported.
CHURCHES IN NEW DELHI ORDER
In New Delhi, authorities have ordered a curfew rule for the weekend to place curbs on shopping malls, gyms, restaurants and some weekly markets.
Outside a large morgue in the city, weeping relatives gathered in the hot sun, waiting for the bodies of loved ones to be released.
Forty-year-old Prashant Mehra said he had to pay a broker for preferential treatment before he could get his 90-year-old grandfather admitted to an overcrowded government hospital.
“He died after six or seven hours,” he said.
Oxygen stocks have been low in places like Gujarat, home of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“If such conditions continue, the death toll will rise,” the head of a medical body in the industrial city of Ahmedabad said in a letter to his chief minister.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries will supply Maharashtra with 100 tonnes of extra oxygen, a state of the nation address said.
In the northern city of Haridwar, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims gathered on Wednesday for a Hindu religious festival on the banks of the River Ganges, sparking fears of a new upsurge.
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