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. In an effort to combat crisis, India has announced that it will soon extend its vaccination campaign to all adults.
“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.
Only a few months after India thought it had seen the worst pandemic, the virus has now spread faster than ever before, said Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who has detected infections in India.
The country is not alone. Several places in the world are seeing deeper crises, including Brazil and France, which are partly fueled by new variants. More than a year into the pandemic, deaths worldwide are rising again, averaging nearly 12,000 a day and also new cases climbing. Over the weekend, the worldwide death toll surpassed 3 million people.
But the boom was devastating in India and weighing heavily on global efforts to end the pandemic As the country is a major vaccine producer, it has been forced to delay the export of shots abroad, which is hampering campaigns in developing countries in particular. In a sign of high interest, the CEO of Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines, asked US President Joe Biden on Twitter last week. to lift the U.S. embargo on the export of raw materials needed to make the shots.
As the battle with the increasing number of cases is fought, India announced on Monday that they will vaccinate everyone over the age of 18 from 1 May. The country began vaccinating health workers in mid-January and later expanded it to people over 45. India has so far administered 120 million doses. to its population of nearly 1.4 billion.
The country reported more than 270,000 infections on Monday, 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. Amid the increase in affairs, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has canceled a trip to New Delhi.
The city of 29 million people has less than 100 beds with ventilators, and less than 150 beds available for patients in need of critical care. Similar strains can be seen in other parts of the vast country, where the fragile health care system has been underfunded for decades and the failure to prepare for the current boom has left hospitals under pressure from increasing infections.
In the Himalayan region of Jammu and Kashmir controlled by India, the weekly average of COVID-19 cases has increased elevenfold in the past month. In the state of Telengana in southern India, home to the city of Hyderabad, where most of the vaccine makers are based in India, the weekly average infections have increased 16 times in the past month.
Meanwhile, election campaigns are continuing in the state of West Bengal in eastern India, amid a disturbing increase there as well, and experts fear that pressure rallies could fuel the spread of the virus. The top leaders of the ruling Bhartiya Janta party, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, fought fiercely to win polls in the region.
In contrast, officials in New Delhi have again begun 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 for those 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 be allowed to travel to airports or train stations – a difference in the last time thousands of migrant workers were forced to walk to their hometowns.
That hard closure last year, which lasted months, 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, the Delhi official, encouraged calm, especially among migrant workers who had suffered particularly during the previous strike, saying that this would be ‘small’.
But many feared it would cause economic ruin. Amrit Tripathi, a laborer in New Delhi, was among the thousands who walked home during the closure last year.
“We will starve,” he said as the current measures were expanded.
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This story has been updated to correct that the weekly average COVID-19 cases have increased 11 times in the Himalayan region of Jammu and Kashmir in the past month, not 14 times. It also corrects that that region is not a state.
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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.