NEW DELHI (AP) – Seema Gandotra, sick with the coronavirus, gasped in an ambulance for 10 hours as it tried unsuccessfully in six hospitals in India’s sprawling capital to find an open bed. By the time she was admitted it was too late and the 51-year-old died hours later.
Rajiv Tiwari, whose oxygen levels started to drop after testing positive for the virus, has the opposite problem: he identified an open bed, but the 30-year-old resident of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh cannot reach it. “There is no ambulance to take me to the hospital,” he said.
Such tragedies are known from fluctuations in other parts of the world – but were largely unknown in India, which prevented a collapse of its health system from a hard lockdown last year.But now they are everyday occurrences in the vast country, which is experiencing the biggest boom in the pandemic so far and is seeing the chronically underfunded health system crumble.
Tests have been delayed. Medical oxygen is scarce. Hospitals are understaffed and overflowing. Intensive care units are full. Almost all fans are in use and the dead pile up near crematoriums and cemeteries. In the past 24 hours alone, India registered more than 250,000 new infections and more than 1,700 deaths, and the UK announced a travel ban this week for most visitors from the country. Overall, India has reported more than 15 million cases and about 180,000 deaths – and experts say these numbers are likely too low.
The spate of cases in India is contributing to a global increase in infections as many places face deeper crises, such as Brazil and France, spurred in part by new, more contagious variants, including one that appeared for the first time. discovered in India.More than a year after the pandemic, global deaths have passed 3 million and are rising again, averaging nearly 12,000 a day. At the same time, vaccination campaigns have seen setbacks in many places – and India’s surge has only exacerbated that: the country is a major vaccine producer but has been forced to delay the supply of injections to focus on domestic demand.
Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who has been monitoring the pandemic in India, said India was not learning from spikes elsewhere and was taking anticipatory action.
When new infections began to subside in September, authorities believed the worst pandemic was over. Health Minister Harsh Vardhan even stated in March that the country had entered the ‘end game’ – but he was already behind the curve: the average weekly number of cases in the state of Maharashtra, home to the financial capital Mumbai, was the last month tripled.
Mukherjee was one of those who urged authorities to take advantage of the low levels earlier this year to speed up vaccinations. Instead, officials were reluctant to limit large gatherings during Hindu festivals and refused to delay ongoing elections in the eastern state of West Bengal, where experts fear large, unmasked crowds at rallies will spur the spread of the virus.
Now India’s two largest cities have imposed strict lockdowns, the pain of which will fall inordinately on the poor. Many have already left the big cities, fearing a repeat of last year, when an abrupt lockdown forced many migrant workers to walk to their hometowns or risk starvation.
New Delhi, the capital, is in a hurry to convert schools into hospitals. Field hospitals in badly affected cities that were abandoned are being resuscitated. India is trying to import oxygen and has begun to divert the industry’s oxygen supply to the health system.
It remains to be seen whether these frantic efforts will be enough. The government-run Sanjay Gandhi Hospital in New Delhi is increasing the number of beds for COVID-19 patients from 46 to 160. But R. Meneka, the official who coordinates the COVID-19 response at the hospital, said he did not was certain whether the institution had the capacity to supply so many beds with oxygen.
The government-run hospital in Burari, an industrial center in the suburbs of the capitals, had only two days of oxygen on Monday and found that most of the vendors in town were exhausted, said Ramesh Verma, who coordinates the COVID-19 response there. .
“We get hundreds of calls for beds every minute,” he said.
Kamla Devi, a 71-year-old diabetic, was rushed to a hospital in New Delhi when her blood sugar dropped last week. Upon returning home, her level plummeted again, but this time there were no beds. She died before she could be tested for the virus. “Whether you have corona (virus) or not, it doesn’t matter. The hospitals have no place for you, ”said Dharmendra Kumar, her son.
Laboratories were unprepared for the surge in testing demand that accompanied the current surge, and everyone was “caught with their pants down,” said A. Velumani, the chairman and general manager of Thyrocare, one of India’s largest private testing laboratories. He said the current demand was three times that of last year.
The massive vaccination campaign in India is also struggling. Several states have reported shortages, although the federal government claims there are adequate supplies.
India said last week it would allow the use of all COVID-19 recordings that had been given the green light by the World Health Organization or regulators in the United States, Europe, Great Britain or Japan. On Monday, it said it would soon extend vaccinations to every adult in the country, an estimated 900 million people. But with a global shortage of vaccines, it is not clear when Indian vaccine manufacturers will have the capacity to achieve these goals. Indian vaccine maker Bharat Biotech said it was scaling up to make 700 million doses per year.
Meanwhile, Shahid Malik, who works at a small oxygen supplier, said the demand for medical oxygen has increased by a factor of 10. His phone has been ringing continuously for two days. Monday the store still had oxygen, but no bottles.
He answered every call with the same message: “If you have your own cylinder, come get the oxygen. If you don’t, we can’t help you. ”
Associated Press journalists, Biswajeet Banerjee in Lucknow and Krutika Pathi in Bengaluru contributed.
The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.