New Delhi: India's daily coronavirus death toll passed a new record on Saturday as the government battled to get oxygen supplies to hospitals overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of new daily cases.
Queues of COVID-19 patients and their fearful relatives are building up outside hospitals in major cities across India, the new world pandemic hotspot, which has now reported nearly one million new cases in three days.
Another 2,624 deaths, a new daily record, were reported in 24 hours, taking the official toll to nearly 190,000 since the pandemic started.
More than 340,000 new cases were also reported, taking India's total to 16.5 million, second only to the United States.
When will it peak?
But many experts are predicting the current wave will not peak for at least three weeks and that the real death and case numbers are much higher.
Stung by criticism of its lack of preparation ahead of the wave of infections, the central government has organised special trains to get oxygen supplies to the worst-hit cities.
It has also pressed industrialists to increase production of oxygen and other life-saving drugs in short supply.
One 'oxygen express' carrying 30,000 litres for hospitals arrived in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh state at dawn on Saturday, where armed guards were waiting to escort trucks to hospitals.
Worst hit
Lucknow has been one of the worst hit cities, with hospitals and crematoriums inundated with patients and bodies, and officials said the liquid oxygen would only be enough for half a day's needs.
The Indian air force is also being used to transport oxygen tankers and other supplies around the country.
In New Delhi, the city's government said it would begin setting up buffer stocks of oxygen to speed supplies to hospitals when they are within hours of running out.
Many patients are dying outside hospitals in the capital because of the lack of beds and oxygen.
One charity has set up an overflow crematorium in a car park, with makeshift funeral pyres built to deal with the mounting deaths.
India's COVID surge shows climate, youth don't protect against pandemic: Fauci
The chief US expert on the COVID-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci, has said that the "dire situation" that has now arisen in India after it initially seemed to have avoided the worst impact shows that no country is safe from a global pandemic, and climate and youth are not protections against it.
Fauci said at a White House briefing that early on, when lower- and middle-income countries didn't have as many infections, "people would say, 'Maybe there's something special about climate, about this, about the youth'".
"What this (surge) is telling us -- in Africa and in India -- (is) that when you have a global pandemic, it is a global pandemic and there are no countries that are really safe from it," said Fauci, who is President Joe Biden's medical adviser.
He said that India needed the vaccines although variants of the COVID-19 virus have developed in India and the efficacy of vaccines against them has to be studied.
"They have a situation there where there are variants that have arisen. We have not yet fully characterised the variants and the relationship between the ability of the vaccines to protect, but we're assuming, clearly, that they need vaccines," Fauci said.
"They need to get their people vaccinated because that's the only way we're going to turn that around," he added.
He said that the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), the main US medical agency, is consulting with India and giving technical assistance.
White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeffrey Dunston Zients said, "India demonstrates the risk of what can happen if we don't get the pandemic under control everywhere."
Hospitals overrun as India's COVID-19 infections top global record
People scrambled for life-saving oxygen supplies across India on Friday and patients lay dying outside hospitals as the capital recorded the equivalent of one death from COVID-19 every five minutes. Read more
20 COVID-19 patients die at Delhi hospital due to lack of oxygen
About 20 COVID-19 patients died on Friday night at Jaipur Golden Hospital in Delhi due to low supply of oxygen. The hospital has appealed to the authority in the national capital to arrange oxygen at the earliest. Read more
from World,Europe,Asia,India,Pakistan,Philipines,Oceania,Americas,Africa Feed https://ift.tt/32MKq1q
No comments:
Post a Comment