Many Indian hospitals overwhelmed by COVID grow like beds, oxygen remains short

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 experts blamed everything, from official satisfaction to aggressive options. The government blamed a widespread failure to practice physical distance and to wear face 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 New 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 blockade at midnight, a move that has prompted a rush to store essential items in advance.

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, while overworked doctors had them. assisted, 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, cars or self-sufficient throughout the day.

“Also, last year I did not 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 LNJP medical director Suresh Kumar.

“We are definitely overloaded … Today we have 158 admissions 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 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 114 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.

India on Thursday said regulators will decide on emergency applications for COVID-19 foreign vaccines within three business days as it tries to entice Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna to sell their photos .

Watch the pandemic in India: tmsnrt.rs/3tks6Zt

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. “I already asked for the money back.”

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 staff in the industrial city of Ahmedabad state said in a letter.

The television broadcast images of a long queue of ambulances carrying virus patients waiting to be hospitalized at a city hospital that can accommodate more than 1,000 patients.

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.

Reliance Industries, billionaire Mukesh Ambani, will supply 100 metric tons of additional oxygen to Maharashtra through its refinery in Jamnagar, western India, 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.