As a serious new milestone in the coronavirus pandemic, India registered 312,731 new infections in a 24-hour period, the Indian Health Ministry said Thursday. It is the highest number of daily cases in one country since the virus showed up in China more than a year ago.
India’s total, according to a New York Times database, eclipsed the previous one-day record of 300,669 cases recorded in the United States on Jan. 8.
In the past two months, the outbreak in India has exploded, with reports of superspreader meetings, oxygen shortages and ambulances stationed outside hospitals because there are no fans for new patients.
With cases worldwide reaching new weekly records, 40 percent of infections come from India, a sobering reminder that the pandemic is far from over, even as infections are declining and vaccinations in the United States and other wealthy parts of the world accelerate. India has exceeded a total of 15.6 million infections, the second after the United States.
The death toll is also starting to rise abruptly.
On Thursday, the Indian government recorded 2,104 deaths and an average of more than 1,300 people died from the virus every day for the past week. That’s less than at worst points of the pandemic in the United States or Brazil, but it’s a sharp increase from just two months ago when fewer than 100 people died in India every day.
There are signs that the country’s health system, which was patchy even before the pandemic, is collapsing under the pressure. At least 22 people died in an accident in the central city of Nashik on Tuesday, when a leak in a hospital’s main oxygen tank cut off oxygen supply to Covid-19 patients.
The picture is astonishingly different from the beginning of February, when India registered an average of just 11,000 cases a day and domestic pharmaceutical companies pumped millions of vaccine doses. More than 132 million Indians have received at least one dose, but supplies are running out and experts warn that the country is unlikely to reach its target of 300 million people by the summer.
Critics say Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who imposed a harsh nationwide lockdown in the early stages of the pandemic in March 2020, did not prepare for a second wave or warned Indians to remain vigilant against the virus, especially as more contagious variants emerged. started to spread. .
Mr Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has also allowed a major Hindu festival to take place, drawing millions of pilgrims to the banks of the Ganges River, and his party has held packed political rallies in several states.
“India’s rapid slide into this unprecedented crisis is a direct result of government complacency and lack of preparation,” Ramanan Laxminarayan, the director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in Washington, wrote in The New York Times Tuesday.
The worst affected region is Maharashtra, a densely populated western state encompassing Mumbai’s financial center. On Wednesday, the top state leader ordered government offices to operate at a 15 percent capacity and imposed new restrictions on weddings and private transportation to slow the spread of the virus.