NEW DELHI / BENGAL (Reuters) – Many Indians rushed to secure hospital beds for relatives affected by the coronavirus on Thursday, while infections reached a daily high, overwhelming medical facilities and depleting oxygen supplies.
A second massive wave of infections is focusing on the rich state of Maharashtra, which accounts for a quarter of the number and is spreading as doctors and experts blame everything from official satisfaction to aggressive options.
The government has accused the government of failing to comply with the rules on physical distance and the use of masks.
“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 Delhi.
“We are a 900-bed hospital, but there are about 60 patients waiting and we don’t have room for them.”
Maharashtra, which hosts Mumbai’s financial capital, has begun a midnight blockade to control the spread of disease, a move that has hastened the storage of essential items in advance.
India added 200,739 infections in the last 24 hours, according to the Ministry of Health, for a seventh record daily increase in the last eight days, while 1,038 deaths reached 173,123.
Its number of 14.1 million infections is second only to the United States, with 31.4 million.
Despite injecting about 113 million doses of vaccine, the highest figure in the world after the United States and China, India covered only a small part of 1.4 billion people.
Watch the pandemic in India: tmsnrt.rs/3tks6Zt
Chart: COVID-19 cases in major Indian cities:
Chart: Daily case load in India:
CURVES ORDERED IN THE NEW DELHI
In the capital, New Delhi, authorities have ordered a weekend shutdown, placing curbs on malls, gyms, restaurants and some weekly markets.
As infections grew, doctors warned that the growth could be more deadly than last year.
“This virus is more infectious and virulent … We have 35-year-old children with intensive care pneumonia, which was not the case last year,” said pediatrician Dhiren Gupta of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital. “The situation is chaotic.”
Outside a major city grave, weeping relatives gathered in the hot sun to wait for their loved ones’ bodies 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. “I already asked for the money back.”
Oxygen supplies, essential for combating breathing difficulties, have declined in places such as Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“If such conditions persist, the death toll will rise,” the head of a medical staff in the industrial city of Ahmedabad state said in a letter.
The television broadcast images with a long queue of ambulances transporting patients with viruses waiting to be hospitalized at a city hospital that can accommodate more than 1,000.
India was producing oxygen at full capacity for each of the last two days, the government said, and increased production.
“Along with the increase in production … and the surplus of available stocks, the current availability is sufficient,” the health ministry said in a statement.
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.
Reporting by Neha Arora and Alasdair Pal in New Delhi; Additional reports by Rama Venkat in Bengaluru and Sumit Khanna in Ahmedabad; Written by Sachin Ravikumar; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Clarence Fernandez