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.
Experts blamed everything from official complacency to aggressive variants. The government blamed a widespread lack of physical distance distribution and the wearing of face masks.
“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 of Mumbai, started a lockdown at midnight, a move that led to people rushing to stock up on essential items in advance.
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 while overworked doctors attended them, according to one witness of Reuters.
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 long, arriving by ambulance, cars, or auto rickshaws throughout the day.
“We didn’t experience such a bad situation last year either. This time the number is very high and it is increasing very quickly, at (a) very high rate, so the situation is really alarming, ”said LNJP Medical Director Suresh Kumar.
“We are definitely overloaded … Today we have 158 recordings in Lok Nayak alone. All sick patients, all serious patients, ”added Kumar.
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.
The number of 14.1 million infections is in second place after the United States, with 31.4 million.
Despite injecting about 114 million doses of vaccine, the highest figure in the world after the United States and China, 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 as it tries to persuade Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna to sell their injections.
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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 an overloaded government hospital.
“He died after six or seven hours,” he said. “We have already claimed our money back.”
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.
Televised footage of a long line of ambulances with virus patients waiting to be admitted to a city hospital that can accommodate more than 1,000 patients.
India had been producing oxygen at full capacity for the past two days, the government said, and it had ramped up production.
“Along with increased production … and the surplus supplies that are available, the current availability is sufficient,” the health ministry said in a statement.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries will supply 100 metric tons of supplemental oxygen to Maharashtra through its Jamnagar refinery in western India, a minister of state said.
In the northern city of Haridwar, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims had come to a Hindu religious festival on the banks of the Ganges River on Wednesday, sparking fears of another wave.
Reporting by Neha Arora, Danish Siddiqui, Sunil Kataria, Alasdair Pal and Krishna Das in New Delhi and Sumit Khanna in Ahmedabad; Additional reporting by Rama Venkat and Akshay Lodaya in Bengaluru; Written by Sachin Ravikumar; Adaptation by Lincoln Feast, Clarence Fernandez and Nick Macfie