India COVID deaths top 4,000 a day
NEW DELHI (AFP) – New COVID-19 deaths surged past 4,000 for the first time in India yesterday as it struggled with one of the world’s worst outbreaks, but the global immunization effort was boosted with the World Health Organization (WHO)’s approval of Chinese firm Sinopharm’s vaccine for emergency use.
While many Western countries have started easing restrictions, thanks to rapid vaccinations, the head of the WHO warned that more countries could suffer the kind of deadly outbreaks currently raging in India, Brazil and Nepal.
India now accounts for nearly half of the world’s new known cases according to an AFP database, and it reported a national record 4,187 new deaths yesterday.
The Indian government has struggled to contain the outbreak, which has overwhelmed its health care system and sparked anger and frustration among the public.
“The government says there is ample supply of medicines and oxygen,” said Brijesh Pandey, who spends hours every day jostling with others to try to secure oxygen for his brother-in-law. “But look how hundreds of desperate people are struggling to save their brothers, sisters and parents.”
India reported 401,078 new infections yesterday, but many experts suspect the official death and case numbers are a gross underestimate.
The surge has spilled into next-door Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
Its eastern neighbor Pakistan yesterday began a nine-day shutdown targeting travel and tourist hot spots to try to stop its outbreak from snowballing during the upcoming Eid celebrations at the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
The global arsenal against the coronavirus expanded last Friday as the vaccine from China’s Sinopharm became the first fully non-Western shot to get the green light from the WHO.
The WHO has already given emergency use authorization to vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca, a status that paves the way for countries to quickly approve and import shots.
Sinopharm is already in use in 42 territories around the world, including Pakistan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Serbia.
The approval came as the WHO reiterated its warning about worsening outbreaks in many countries, with more cases reported in the past two weeks than during the first six months of the pandemic.