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Gallery|Coronavirus pandemic

India’s COVID ’emergency’ amid record jump in virus infections

India’s crumbling health services struggle to cope amid world’s highest daily tally of new cases and record deaths.

Health workers attend to a suspected COVID-19 positive patient in Mumbai. [Divyakant Solanki/EPA]
Published On 22 Apr 202122 Apr 2021
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India has recorded the world’s highest daily tally of 314,835 new COVID-19 infections as a second wave of the pandemic raised new fears about the crumbling health services’ ability to cope.

Health officials across northern and western India including the capital, New Delhi, said they were in crisis, with most hospitals full and running out of oxygen on Thursday.

Some doctors were advising patients to stay at home, while a crematorium in the eastern city of Muzaffarpur said it was being overwhelmed with bodies and grieving families had to wait for their turn. A crematorium east of Delhi built funeral pyres in its parking lot.

“Right now there are no beds, no oxygen. Everything else is secondary,” Shahid Jameel, a virologist and director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University, told Reuters news agency.

“The infrastructure is crumbling.”

Some hospitals in New Delhi had run out of oxygen and authorities in neighbouring states were stopping supplies being taken to the capital to save it for their own needs, the city’s deputy chief minister, Manish Sisodia said.

“It might become difficult for hospitals here to save lives,” Sisodia said in a televised address.

Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said there was a shortage of intensive care unit (ICU) beds, with the city needing about 5,000 more than it could find.

“We can’t call this a comfortable situation,” he told reporters.

India’s Supreme Court has likened the situation to a “national emergency” and directed the federal government to prepare a national plan on oxygen supply, essential drugs and vaccinations.

Health workers stand around a patient waiting to be transferred to an intensive care unit (ICU), at a recovery centre to treat coronavirus patients, in Mumbai. [Punit Paranjpe/AFP]
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Family members of a COVID-19 patient who died in a government hospital in Kolkata. [Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto via Getty Images]
A COVID-19 patient gets admitted to a government hospital in Kolkata. [Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto via Getty Images]
Health workers help a patient inside an ambulance at a recovery centre to treat coronavirus patients in Mumbai. [Punit Paranjpe/AFP]
Workers unloading oxygen cylinders at the Commonwealth Games Village COVID-19 Care Centre in New Delhi. [Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images]
The COVID-19 emergency ward, at ESIC (Indira Gandhi) Hospital in Jhilmil, New Delhi. [Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images]
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A medical professional sorts oxygen cylinders at ESIC (Indira Gandhi) Hospital in Jhilmil, New Delhi. [Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images]
A paramedic uses an oximeter to check the oxygen level of a patient inside an ambulance while waiting to enter a COVID-19 hospital for treatment in Ahmedabad. [Amit Dave/Reuters]
A patient with breathing problems inside a car while waiting to enter a COVID-19 hospital for treatment in Ahmedabad. [Amit Dave/Reuters]
The body of a person who died of COVID-19 is placed on a pyre while others burn in the background in Noida outside New Delhi. [Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times via Getty Images]


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