NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Many Indian hospitals were battling beds and oxygen as COVID-19 infections hit a new daily high on Thursday, with a second wave of infections focusing on the rich western state of Maharashtra.
The total number of infections in India is second only to the United States, with experts accusing them of everything from official satisfaction to aggressive variants. The government blamed the failure to practice physical distance.
The country has produced oxygen at full capacity for each of the last two days, but will have to focus on imports, with the health ministry saying it intends to import 50,000 metric tons.
“The situation is horrible,” said Avinash Gawande, an official at a government hospital in the industrial city of Nagpur, which is battling a flood of patients, as are hospitals in neighboring Gujarat and northern New Delhi.
“We are a 900-bed hospital, but there are about 60 patients waiting and we don’t have room for them.”
Maharashtra, home to the financial capital of Mumbai, began a blockade at midnight on Wednesday, a move that prompted a rush to store essential items in advance. The state, the country’s most industrial, was hardest hit by the pandemic.
At Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital (LNJP) in New Delhi, the largest unit in the country that treats patients with COVID-19, two or three patients were seen dividing individual beds in some wards, a Reuters witness said.
COVID-positive patients – from a one-and-a-half-year-old child to many elderly people – and their relatives continued to drive to the LNJP emergency department, arriving by ambulance, car or car throughout the day.
“Also, last year we didn’t see such a bad situation. This time the number is very high and growing very fast, going (at a very high speed), so the situation is really alarming,” said the medical director of LNJP, Suresh Kumar.
“We are definitely overworked … Today we have 158 hospitalizations in Lok Nayak alone. All sick patients, all severe patients,” Kumar added.
India added 200,739 infections in the last 24 hours, according to the Ministry of Health, for a seventh daily record in the last eight days, while 1,038 deaths took effect at 173,123.
Despite injecting the third largest dose of vaccines in the world, India has covered only a small part of 1.4 billion people.
India said on Thursday that regulators will decide on emergency applications for foreign COVID-19 vaccines within three business days. India’s ambassador to Moscow said deliveries of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine to India should begin before the end of April, TASS news agency reported.
CURVES ORDERED IN THE NEW DELHI
In New Delhi, authorities ordered a firefight over the weekend, placing curbs on malls, gyms, restaurants and some weekly markets.
Outside a major city grave, weeping relatives gathered under the hot sun, waiting for the bodies of their loved ones to be released.
Forty-year-old Prashant Mehra said he had to pay a broker for preferential treatment before he could admit his 90-year-old grandfather to an overcrowded government hospital.
“He died after six or seven hours,” he said.
Oxygen supplies have fallen in places like Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“If such conditions persist, the death toll will rise,” the head of a medical corps in the industrial city of Ahmedabad said in a letter to his chief minister.
Reliance Industries, billionaire Mukesh Ambani, will supply 100 metric tons of additional oxygen to Maharashtra, a state minister said.
In the northern city of Haridwar, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims flocked to a Hindu religious festival on the banks of the Ganges on Wednesday, sparking fears of a new wave.
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