India recorded the world’s highest daily count of 314,835 COVID-19 infections on Thursday, as a second wave of the pandemic sparked new fears about the ability of crumbling health services to cope.
Health officials in North and West India, including the capital New Delhi, said they were in crisis, with most hospitals full and without oxygen.
Doctors in some places advised patients to stay at home while a crematorium in the eastern city of Muzaffarpur said it was overwhelmed with bodies and grieving families had to wait their turn.
“Right now, there are no beds, no oxygen. Everything else is secondary,” Shahid Jameel, a virologist and director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University, told Reuters.
“The infrastructure is crumbling.”
Krutika Kuppalli, assistant professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina in the United States, said on Twitter that the crisis led to a collapse of the health care system.
The previous record one-day increase in the number of cases was held by the United States, which had 297,430 new cases in one day in January, although the number has fallen sharply since then.
The total number of cases in India is now 15.93 million, while the number of deaths has increased by 2,104 to a total of 184,657, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Health.
On television were images of people with empty oxygen bottles who found themselves filling facilities as they rushed to rescue family members in the hospital.
In the western city of Ahmedabad, a man was tied to an oxygen bottle in the back of a car outside a hospital while waiting for a bed, a photo from Reuters revealed.
“We never thought a second wave would hit us so hard,” Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, executive chairman of health care company Biocon & Biocon Biologics, wrote in the Economic Times.
“Complacency led to unexpected shortages of medicines, medical supplies and hospital beds.”
Delhi’s health minister Satyendar Jain said there is a shortage of intensive care beds and the city needs about 5,000 more than it could find. Some hospitals had enough oxygen to last for 10 hours, others only six.
“We cannot call this a comfortable situation,” he told reporters.
Similar spikes of infections elsewhere in the world, particularly in South America, threaten to overwhelm other health services. read more
India has launched a vaccination program, but only a small part of the population has had the chance.
Authorities have announced that vaccines will be available to anyone over the age of 18 from May 1, but India will not have enough injections for the 600 million eligible people, experts say.
Health experts said India had dropped its guard when the virus appeared to be under control during the winter, when there were about 10,000 new cases daily, and that it has lifted restrictions to allow for large gatherings.
Some experts say new, more contagious virus variants, particularly a “double mutant” variant originating in India, are largely responsible for the spike in cases, but many also blame the politicians.
“The second wave is a result of complacency and mixing and mass gatherings. You don’t need a variant to explain the second wave,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government ordered a comprehensive lockdown last year, in the early stages of the pandemic, but was wary of the economic costs of tighter restrictions.
In recent weeks, the government has come under criticism for hosting packed political rallies for local elections and allowing a Hindu festival that brought millions together.
This week, Modi urged state governments to use lockdowns as a last resort. He asked people to stay indoors and said the government was working to increase the supply of oxygen and vaccines.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health and Science Security, said the situation in India was “heartbreaking and terrible.”
“It is the result of a complex mix of bad policy decisions, bad advice to justify those decisions, global and domestic politics and a host of other complex variables,” she said on Twitter.
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