NEW DELHI (AP) – New Delhi imposed a week-long lock-up on Monday night to prevent the collapse of the Indian capital’s health system, which authorities say has been pushed to its limits amid an explosive increase in coronavirus cases.
In scenes familiar with training elsewhere, ambulances catapulted from one hospital to another, trying over the weekend to find an empty bed while patients lined up outside the medical facilities to be admitted. dead corpses each.
“People arrive, in an almost collapsing situation,” says Dr. Suresh Kumar, who heads Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital, one of New Delhi’s largest hospitals for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.
Kumar needs the most oxygen. According to Prime Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who told reporters that the new austerity measures being put in place were needed to prevent a collapse of the health care system, ‘which’ has reached its limit ‘, the city is struggling with oxygen and medicine.
Only a few months after India thought it had seen the worst pandemic, the virus is now spreading faster than ever before, Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan, followed up on infections in India.
The boom is devastating for India and weighs heavily on global efforts to end the pandemic As the country is a major producer of vaccines, but the export of shots abroad is forced, campaigns in developing countries in particular are hampered.
The increase in cases comes as the global coronavirus death toll surpassed a staggering 3 million people on Saturday amid repeated setbacks in the global vaccination campaign and a deepening crisis in places outside India, such as Brazil and France.
India on Monday reported more than 270,000 infections, the highest daily rise since the pandemic. It has now recorded more than 15 million infections and more than 178,000 deaths. Experts agree that even these figures are probably not enough. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has halted a trip to New Delhi amid rising business.
New Delhi, a city of 29 million people, has fewer than 100 beds with ventilators, and fewer than 150 beds available for patients in need of critical care. Similar scenes took place in other parts of the wide country. In the Himalayan state of Jammu in northern India, the weekly average COVID-19 cases have increased 14 times in the past month.
In response, officials resumed imposing strict measures. The Indian capital was closed over the weekend, but now the authorities are extending it for a week: all shops and factories will close except the shops 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 care. They will also be allowed to travel to airports or train stations.
These were the strictest measures imposed since the hard closing of India last year, which lasted months and left deep scars. Politicians have since been reluctant to even mention the word. When similar measures were introduced in recent days in the state of Mahrashtra, home of the financial capital of Mumbai, officials refused to call it a shutdown. These restrictions must last for 15 days.
Kejriwal encouraged calm, especially among migrant workers who had suffered especially during the previous downtime, saying it would be a ‘small shutdown’.
But many feared it would cause economic ruin. Amrit Tripathi, a laborer in New Delhi, was among the thousands who walked miles away after India suddenly announced a harsh and nationwide exclusion in 2020. “We will starve,” he said if the current exclusion was extended.
Doctors and officials say the measures are needed to ease the pressure on the fragile health care system, which has been underfunded for decades. The failure to prepare for the current boom has left hospitals in New Delhi and other major cities collapsing under the pressure of increasing infections.
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Hussain reports from Srinagar. Associated Press author Neha Mehrotra contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Division receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.