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.
Experts blame everything, from official complacency to aggressive variants. The government blamed the widespread failure to physically relinquish and wear face masks.
“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 neighboring Gujarat state and New Delhi in the north. .
“We are a hospital with 900 beds, but there are about 60 patients waiting and we do not have room for that.”
Maharashtra, home of the financial capital of Mumbai, began an exclusion at midnight, a move that built up a rush to advance essential items.
At the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) Hospital in New Delhi, the country’s largest facility treating COVID-19 patients, two or three patients were seen sharing single beds in some wards while overworked doctors treated them. a Reuters witness said.
COVID-positive patients – from a toddler of one and a half years to many elderly people – and their family members constantly flocked to the emergency department at LNJP and arrived daily by ambulance, cars or car rickshaws.
“Last year we did not see such a bad situation either. This time the number is very high and it is increasing fast, with a very fast speed, so the situation is really worrying, ”said Suresh Kumar, medical director of LNJP.
‘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, according to the Ministry of Health, for a seventh daily record increase in the last eight days, while 1,038 deaths have taken its toll to 173,123.
The count of 14.1 million infections is second in the United States with 31.4 million.
Despite injecting about 114 million vaccine doses, the highest figure worldwide to the United States and China, India covered only a small portion of its 1.4 billion people.
India on Thursday said regulators will decide on emergency applications for foreign COVID-19 vaccines within three working days as they try to lure Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna to sell their shots.
Follow the pandemic in India: tmsnrt.rs/3tks6Zt
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 have his 90-year-old grandfather admitted to an overcrowded state hospital.
“He died after six or seven hours,” he said. “We asked for all our money back.”
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.
Television broadcast images of a long line of ambulances with virus sufferers waiting to be admitted to a city hospital that can accommodate more than 1,000 patients.
India has been producing oxygen at full capacity for the past two days, the government said, increasing production.
“Along with the increased production … and the surplus stock available, the current availability is adequate,” the health ministry said in a statement.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries will supply 100 tons of additional oxygen to Maharashtra through its refinery in Jamnagar in western India, a minister 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.
Reporting by Neha Arora, Danish Siddiqui, Sunil Kataria, Alasdair Pal and Krishna Das in New Delhi and Sumit Khanna in Ahmedabad; Additional reporting by Rama Venkat and Akshay Lodaya in Bengaluru; Written by Sachin Ravikumar; Edited by Lincoln Feast, Clarence Fernandez and Nick Macfie