NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Many Indian hospitals were looking for beds and oxygen as COVID-19 infections soared to a new daily record Thursday, with a second wave of infections targeting the wealthy western state of Maharashtra.
The total number of infections in India ranks second to the United States, with experts blaming everything from official complacency to aggressive variants. The government has blamed not exercising physical distance.
The country has been producing oxygen at full capacity each of the past two days for the past two days, but will have to resort to imports, with the Health Ministry saying it planned to import 50,000 tons.
“The situation is dire,” said Avinash Gawande, an official at a government hospital in the industrial city of Nagpur that was dealing with a flood of patients, as were hospitals in the neighboring state of Gujarat and New Delhi to the north.
“We are a 900-bed hospital, but we have about 60 patients waiting and we don’t have room for them.”
Maharashtra, home to the financial capital Mumbai, kicked off a lockdown on Wednesday at midnight, a move that sparked a rush to stock up on essential items ahead of time. The state, the most industrial in the country, has been hit hardest by the pandemic.
At Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) hospital in New Delhi, the country’s largest facility where COVID-19 patients were treated, two or three patients were seen sharing single beds in some wards, a Reuters witness said.
COVID-positive patients – from a toddler of eighteen to many elderly – and their relatives continued to flock to the emergency room at the LNJP all day, arriving by ambulance, car, or auto rickshaw all day.
“Last year we didn’t have such a bad situation either. This time the number is very high and it is increasing very quickly, at a very high speed, so the situation is really alarming,” said LNJP Medical Director Suresh Kumar.
“We are absolutely overloaded … Today we have 158 admissions in Lok Nayak alone. All sick patients, all serious patients,” Kumar added.
India added 200,739 infections in the past 24 hours, data from the Ministry of Health showed, for a seventh daily record increase in the past eight days, while 1,038 deaths took their toll to 173,123.
Despite injecting the third highest number of vaccine doses worldwide, India has covered only a small fraction of its 1.4 billion people.
India said on Thursday that regulators would decide on emergency uses for foreign COVID-19 vaccines within three business days. The Indian ambassador to Moscow said delivery of the Russian coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V to India is expected to begin before the end of April, TASS news agency reported.
CURBS ORDERED IN NEW DELHI
In New Delhi, authorities have ordered a weekend clock, curbing shopping centers, gyms, restaurants and some weekly markets.
Outside a large city morgue, crying 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 real estate agent for preferential treatment before he could have his 90-year-old grandfather admitted to a congested government hospital.
“He died after six or seven hours,” he said.
Oxygen supplies included in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“If such conditions persist, the death toll will rise,” the head of a medical agency in the industrial city of Ahmedabad said in a letter to the prime minister.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries will supply 100 metric tons of supplemental oxygen to Maharashtra, a minister of state said.
In the northern city of Haridwar, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims thronged to a Hindu religious festival on the banks of the Ganges River on Wednesday, sparking fears of another wave.
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