MUMBAI / AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters) – India’s new coronavirus infections reached a record high on Wednesday with Mumbai set to close at midnight, but hundreds of thousands of pilgrims still flocked to a religious festival in the north of the country.
The country has reported 184,372 cases in the past 24 hours, according to data from the Ministry of Health, which has taken the total infections to 13.9 million. Deaths rose by 1,027, for a toll of 172,085.
After India reported less than 10,000 cases a day earlier this year, it is the country that has been hit the hardest since April 2. The government blames here for a widespread failure to take into account movements and social interaction among the population of 1.39 billion people.
The increase in cases comes because the richest state in India, Maharashtra, the center of the national second wave, will go to a complete exclusion at midnight (1830 GMT) until the end of April to limit the spread of the virus. The state is responsible for about a quarter of the country’s total cases of coronavirus.
India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, was busy with buyers and had a stockpile before the closure takes effect.
“We do not know if we will be allowed to set up our stalls this morning, so we ask that our customers store as much as possible today,” said Susheela, a street vegetable retailer, who is just her first name.
There were fluctuating lines outside many grocery stores while residents waited to enter.
Elsewhere, sprawling private hospitals are diverting patients, placing an increasing burden on government facilities.
In the western state of Gujurat, a Reuters witness on Wednesday saw a long line of ambulances waiting outside Ahmedabad Civil Hospital while some patients were being treated there while they were waiting.
‘My wife tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday. “We called an ambulance this morning to take her to hospital as she is struggling to breathe,” Becharbhai Waghela, who accompanied his wife Shantaben, 61, told Reuters.
“We waited in the ambulance outside the hospital campus for the last two hours.”
According to a hospital source, because he is not authorized to speak in public, there are many private hospitals that have oxygen and send their patients to public hospitals.
HERBS PILGRIMES
The state of Chhattisgarh – one of several inland regions struggling with a boom in cases – has set up a temporary 370-bed hospital in an indoor stadium.
“As COVID-19 cases increase and people get hypoxia or low oxygen in the blood, there is a lack of oxygen supply,” said Avinash Chaturvedi, a doctor at the plant.
“We have turned this stadium into a COVID care center to deal with the situation.”
Despite this, hundreds of thousands of religious Hindus gathered on Wednesday to bathe in the Ganges River in the northern city of Haridwar, the third major bathing day of the Kumbh Mela festival that has been going on for weeks.
Sanjay Gunjyal, the inspector general of police at the festival, said about 650,000 people bathed on Wednesday morning.
“People are fined for not following social distance in the ghats (bathing areas), but it is very difficult to fine people in the main ghats, which are very crowded,” he said.
According to a Reuters witness, there was little evidence of social removal or wearing a mask.
According to government data, more than a thousand cases have been reported in the Haridwar district in the past two days.
Reporting by Shilpa Jamkhandikar in Mumbai, Anushree Fadnavis in Haridwar, Saurabh Sharma in Lucknow, Amit Dave and Sumit Khanna in Ahmedabad and Rama Venkat in Bengaluru; Written by Alasdair Pal; Edited by Clarence Fernandez, Simon Cameron-Moore and Toby Chopra