By Danish Siddiqui and Alasdair Pal
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Two men wearing oxygen masks hold a bed in a state hospital in the Indian capital, New Delhi, the victims of the country’s growing COVID-19 crisis.
According to official data, daily infections exceeded 200,000 on Thursday, according to official data, the highest worldwide.
At the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital (LNJP), one of India’s largest facilities containing only COVID, with more than 1,500 beds, a stream of ambulances on Thursday transported patients to the overcrowded casualty department.
Some also arrived in buses and tricycle autorickshaws.
The youngest patient was a newborn baby.
“We are definitely overloaded. We are already working at full capacity,” said hospital medical director Suresh Kumar.
From the initial 54 beds, the hospital now has more than 300 for COVID-19 patients in critical condition. Even that is not enough.
Unrelated patients share beds, while bodies of the recently deceased deceased lie outside the ward before being taken to the morgue.
“Today we have 158 admissions in Lok Nayak alone,” Kumar said. Almost all were serious cases.
After the Government of India introduced one of the strictest closures in the world for almost three months last year, the Government of India has loosened almost all curbs, although many regions have now imposed localized restrictions.
Kumar, LNJP, said that rapidly spreading new variants that evade testing are increasing the burden as well as reopening the behavior of people like the country.
“People do not follow the COVID guidelines,” he said. “They’re just indifferent.”
Outside the hospital’s morgue, crying family members gathered in the hot sun to wait for the bodies of loved ones to be released.
Prashant Mehra, 40, said he had to pay a broker for preferential treatment before he could get his 90-year-old grandfather admitted to hospital. The hospital did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mehra said the effort ultimately makes little difference.
“He died after six or seven hours,” he said. “We asked for all our money back.”
(Reported by Danish Siddiqui, Alasdair Pal and Sunil Kataria; edited by Mike Collett-White)