India’s COVID-19 disaster sets another global record
NEW DELHI — Hospitals and government leaders scrambled for supplies of oxygen and other emergency aid Friday, as India reported another record number of new coronavirus infections and a rising death toll that has strained the country’s resources.
India recorded more than 330,000 new cases in 24 hours, the health ministry said Friday, the second consecutive day the country has set a global record for daily infections. The reported death toll Friday was more than 2,200, also a new high for the country.
About half of the cases in Delhi, a city of more than 20 million people, are testing positive for a more contagious variant of the virus first detected last year in India that’s afflicting younger people, health ministry official Sujeet Singh said.
It’s unclear to what extent the variant is driving the surge in cases around the country, with large gatherings of unmasked people and widespread neglect of preventive measures also suspected.
As India’s catastrophic second wave of the coronavirus deepened Friday, Canada joined Britain, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand in barring travelers from the country. The U.S. State Department advised people against going to India after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raised the country’s risk level to its highest measure.
“Demand for hospital beds and medical supplies have taxed the health care system to capacity in many cities, and critical care bed space is severely limited,” the travel advisory said.
With the mutant strain of the virus racing through Delhi, the capital territory’s government has imposed a weeklong lockdown. That has stranded thousands of people who rely on daily wages, leaving many to camp on the banks of the Yamuna River, where they survive on a Sikh temple’s twice-daily food deliveries.
In Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai and is one of India’s worst-hit states, a hospital fire attributed to a faulty air-conditioning unit killed at least 13 COVID-19 patients Friday. Two days before, at least 22 patients were killed in a hospital in the city of Nashik, also in Maharashtra, after a leak cut off their oxygen supplies.
Facing a barrage of criticism for his government’s handling of the second wave, Prime Minister Narendra Modi canceled plans to travel to West Bengal for a campaign rally ahead of an election in that state.
Even as cases have climbed, Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party and other parties have continued to hold mass rallies with thousands of people unmasked. The government also has allowed an enormous Hindu festival to draw millions of pilgrims despite signs that it has accelerated the spread of the virus.
“Leadership really matters. We saw the early loosening of appropriate measures. Election rallies continued, and religious festivals turned into superspreader events,” said Krishna Udayakumar, an associate professor of global health and director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.
“There was perhaps a lost opportunity to learn from the first wave,” Udayakumar said.
That initial wave peaked in August and September, months after India abandoned a nationwide lockdown that crippled the economy.
The disaster now consuming India is playing out vividly on social media, with Twitter feeds and WhatsApp groups broadcasting hospitals’ pleas for oxygen and medicines and families’ desperate searches for beds in overwhelmed COVID-19 wards. With many hospitals short of ventilators, television news reports have shown patients lying inside ambulances parked outside emergency rooms, struggling to breathe.
Swati Maliwal, an activist and politician in Delhi, tweeted that her grandmother had died while waiting outside a hospital in Greater Noida, near New Delhi.
“I kept standing there for half hour and pleading for admission and nothing happened,” she wrote. “Shame! Pathetic!”