Indian hospitals at breaking point
Dangerous ‘double mutant’ variant feared behind surge
The anguished voice at the end of the line quickly apologised for waking me at 1.30am but was desperate and insistent. The caller explained their 54-yearold aunt’s blood oxygen levels had plummeted and asked if I might know a doctor in Delhi who could help.
The caller explained they had been ringing hospitals for hours and no one was picking up.
In recent days I have received a seemingly endless succession of such calls, as health systems around India have buckled under a tsunami of Covid-19 cases.
The daily tally of cases has accelerated terrifyingly in recent weeks, hitting a record 273,810 infections yesterday, up ten-fold in little over a month.
Overstretched hospitals have quickly been overwhelmed under such an onslaught. There are no beds left in Delhi and Mumbai, and trying to find treatment for a coughing, gasping relative has become a panicked quest for thousands of families.
Relatives contact anyone who might be able to pull a string, who might have some local clout, or who might just know more than them. It includes calling doctors, officials, those with political ties, or in my case a journalist who once interviewed them.
Even the best-connected are struggling and outside the emergency room at Mumbai’s Lilavati Hospital, Gotam Rajani told The Daily Telegraph he was one of the lucky ones after spending a frantic 72 hours hunting a bed for his 75-year-old aunt.
“Neither my aunt or uncle have been able to get a bed and I am so relieved to at least get one bed now, for my aunt,” he said, as a succession of patients were wheeled into the emergency room, surrounded by distraught family members.
The hospital had laid out beds in the lobby and converted a whole floor to a Covid ward, but must still turn patients away, said Dr Kriti Aggarwal, an exhausted 26-year-old resident medical officer inside.
“The manpower here is much less because we are flooded with patients in both the wards and the triage areas and we don’t have enough doctors.”
A new, more transmissible “double mutant” variant is feared to be behind the surge in cases. India has little data on the new strain, but early analysis suggests its mutations make it both more transmissible and able to reinfect patients. The leap in infections has seen British Prime Minister Boris Johnson put India on the UK’s red list of countries requiring passengers to undergo hotel quarantine on arrival, as well as postpone a scheduled visit to India.
Delhi ordered a six-day lockdown yesterday as overall infections passed the 15 million mark, second only to the United States.
Nearly 180,000 deaths have been confirmed, but a lack of testing and a practice by many Indian states of only recording Covid fatalities when there are no comorbidities means the true tally of infections and deaths is thought to be many times higher.
Dr Deepak Baid, head of a major private hospital in Mumbai, said the situation was far worse than during the first wave last year and his hospital had run out of medicines, in addition to beds, which in turn has sparked a nationwide black market for drugs, including remdesivir.
“Definitely there’s a difficulty in getting beds, especially the intensive care and ventilator beds. Even if you get a bed, medicines have become difficult to get because [of] the number of medicines which have been used [and] the demand is much more than the supply.”
Oxygen is also a problem. Officials have barred the supply of oxygen to many industries to meet rising demand from hospitals, after patients in the western state of Maharashtra reported travelling for hundreds of kilometres to find a free bed with an oxygen supply. Clinical demand has increased to three fifths of India’s production and is expected to rise further, the ministry of health said.
The surge in hospital admissions is feeding into a surge in deaths and cremations. In Ghaziabad, near Delhi, one overwhelmed crematorium has been forced to build new brick platforms for pyres on pavements.
Narendra Modi’s government has been criticised for its handling of the crisis, with millions of Hindu devotees attending the Kumbh Mela festival in the northern Indian town of Haridwar, while election rallies have continued unabated in the states of West Bengal and Assam.