Hospitals buckling as fresh surge hits
Seema Gandotra, sick with the coronavirus, gasped for breath in an ambulance for 10 hours as it tried to find a free bed at six hospitals in India’s sprawling capital. By the time she was admitted, it was too late, and the 51-year-old died hours later.
Rajiv Tiwari has the opposite problem: he identified a free bed, but the resident of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh can’t get to it. ‘‘There is no ambulance to take me to the hospital,’’ he said.
Such tragedies are familiar from surges in other parts of the world, but were largely unknown in India, which was able to prevent a collapse in its health system last year through a harsh lockdown. But now they are everyday occurrences in the vast country, which is seeing its largest surge of the pandemic so far and watching its chronically underfunded health system crumble.
Tests are delayed. Medical oxygen is scarce. Hospitals are understaffed and overflowing. Intensive care units are full. Nearly all ventilators are in use, and the dead are piling up at crematoriums and graveyards.
Now India’s two largest cities have imposed strict lockdowns, the pain of which will fall inordinately on the poor. Many have already left major cities, fearing a repeat of last year, when an abrupt lockdown cost millions of migrant workers their jobs and forced many to walk to their home villages or risk starvation.
New Delhi, the capital, is rushing to convert schools into hospitals. Field hospitals in hard-hit cities that had been abandoned are being resuscitated. India is trying to import oxygen and has started to divert supplies from industry to the health system.
India’s massive vaccination drive is also struggling. Several states have flagged shortages, although the federal government says there are enough stocks.
■ Massive house-to-house screening in Fiji’s western towns is being rolled out amid fears that hundreds of people may have picked up Covid-19 at a funeral. Health authorities have described the weekend rites, attended by more than 500 people, as a potential super-spreader event.
‘‘We are mobilising a massive house-to-house screening effort in the Nadi and Lautoka Containment Area to determine people’s travel history, so we know where they have been, and screen for Covid-like symptoms,’’ Fiji’s Health Permanent Secretary Dr James Fong said.