‘HORRIBLE’ TIME FOR INDIA
Expert warns that coming weeks will see worsening COVID toll
NEW DELHI — COVID-19 infections and deaths are mounting with alarming speed in India with no end in sight to the crisis and a top expert warning that the coming weeks in the country of nearly 1.4 billion people will be “horrible.”
India’s official count of coronavirus cases topped 20 million Tuesday, nearly doubling in the past three months, while deaths officially have passed 222,000. The true figures are believed to be far higher.
The country has witnessed scenes of people dying outside overwhelmed hospitals and funeral pyres lighting up the night sky.
Infections have surged in India since February in a disastrous turn blamed on more contagious variants of the virus as well as government decisions to allow massive crowds to gather for Hindu religious festivals and political rallies before state elections.
The reported caseload is second only to that of the United States, which has one-fourth the population of India but has recorded more than 32 million confirmed infections.
The U.S. has also reported close to 580,000 deaths.
India’s top health official, Rajesh Bhushan, refused to speculate last month why authorities weren’t better prepared. But the cost is clear: Many people are dying because of shortages of oxygen and hospital beds or because they couldn’t get a COVID-19 test.
India’s official average of newly confirmed cases per day has soared from more than 65,000 on April 1 to about 370,000, and deaths per day have gone from over 300 to more than 3,000.
On Tuesday, the Health Ministry reported 357,229 new cases in the past 24 hours and 3,449 deaths from COVID-19.
Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health in Providence, R.I., said he is concerned that Indian policymakers he has been in
contact with believe things will improve in the next few days.
“I’ve been ... trying to say to them, ‘If everything goes very well, things will be horrible for the next several weeks. And it may be much longer,’ ” he said.
Jha said the focus needs to be on “classic” public health measures: targeted shutdowns, more testing, universal mask-wearing and avoiding large gatherings.
“That is what’s going to break the back of this surge,” he said.
The death and infection figures are considered unreliable because testing is patchy and reporting incomplete. For example, government guidelines ask Indian states to include suspected COVID-19 cases when recording deaths from the outbreak, but many do not do so.
Municipal records for this past Sunday show 1,680 dead in the Indian capital were treated according to the procedures for handing the bodies of those infected with COVID-19. But in the same 24-hour period, only 407 deaths were added to the official toll from New Delhi.
The New Delhi High Court announced it will start punishing government officials if supplies of oxygen allocated to hospitals are not delivered.