India has the highest daily number of 314,835 COVID-19 infections in the world, while a second wave of pandemic has raised new fears about the ability of health services to collapse to cope.
Health officials in northern and western 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 home, while a crematorium in the eastern city of Muzaffarpur said it was overwhelmed by bodies and grieving families had to wait their turn.
“There are no beds or oxygen at the moment. Everything else is secondary,” Shahid Jameel, a virologist and director of the Trivedi School of Bioscience at Ashoka University, told Reuters.
“Infrastructure is falling apart.”
Krutika Kuppalli, an assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases, Medical University of South Carolina in the United States, said on Twitter that the crisis is leading to the collapse of the health system.
The previous record one-day increase in cases was held by the United States, which registered 297,430 new cases in one day in January, although its number fell sharply.
The total number of cases in India is now 15.93 million, while deaths have increased by 2,104 to a total of 184,657, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Health.
Television showed images of people with empty oxygen cylinders crowding into refills as they rushed to rescue relatives in hospital.
In the western city of Ahmedabad, a man tied to an oxygen cylinder was lying in the back of a car in front of a hospital while waiting for a bed, a Reuters image showed.
“We never thought a second wave would hit us so hard,” Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, chief executive of Biocon & Biocon Biologics, told the Economic Times.
“Complacency has led to an unforeseen shortage of drugs, medical supplies and hospital beds.”
Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said there was a shortage of intensive care beds, with the city needing about 5,000 more than it could find. Some hospitals had enough oxygen to last 10 hours, others only six.
“We can’t call this a comfortable situation,” he told reporters.
Similar increases in infections in other parts of the world, especially in South America, threaten to overwhelm other health services. Read more
India has launched a vaccination campaign, but only a small part of the population has been shot.
Authorities have announced that the vaccines will be available to anyone over the age of 18 from May 1, but India will not have enough photos for the 600 million people who will become eligible, experts say.
Health experts said India had dropped its guard when the virus appeared to be under control in the winter, when new daily cases numbered about 10,000, and lifted restrictions to allow large gatherings.
Some experts say that new, more infectious variants of the virus, especially a “double mutant” variant that has appeared in India, are largely responsible for the increase in cases, but many blame politicians.
“The second wave is a consequence of satisfaction 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 Politics in New Delhi.
The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered an extended blockade last year, in the early stages of the pandemic, but avoided the economic costs of tougher restrictions.
In recent weeks, the government has called for criticism for organizing crowded political rallies for local elections and allowing a Hindu festival to gather millions.
This week, Modi called on state governments to use blockages as a last resort. He urged people to stay inside and said the government was working to increase the supply of oxygen and vaccines.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Center for Global Health and Science Security at Georgetown University, said the situation in India was “heartbreaking and terrible.”
“It’s the result of a complex mix of bad policy decisions, bad advice to justify those decisions, global and domestic policies and a number of other complex variables,” she said on Twitter.
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