MONITORING (SW) – India has topped the world with new coronavirus cases on fourth consecutive day on Sunday with 349,691 new cases.
Health authorities in India confirmed 2,767 deaths in this period with the capital, Delhi, becoming one of the worst-hit areas.
During the past few weeks, Indian social media has been inundated with SOS messages: hospitals tweeting about dwindling oxygen supplies and physicians watching helplessly as patients perish from preventable deaths. A journalist pleading for but denied a hospital bed took to Twitter to log his deteriorating condition till he died, reported the National Geographic.
As cases declined from September 2020 to mid-February 2021, the Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ignored warnings of a second wave, despite the fact that new variants were identified as far back as in January, according to media reports.
“We kept warning that the pandemic was not over but no one was listening,” says Rakesh Mishra, senior principal scientist and director of the Hyderabad-based Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology, who is currently investigating whether a new homegrown variant—B.1.617—is behind India’s second surge.
After the first wave, Mishra says, the healthcare system moved on to tackle other medical emergencies that were neglected during the first wave, and dedicated COVID-19 facilities were converted back to their previous functions.
In March, a few weeks before the new surge, Indian health minister and physician Harsh Vardhan asserted that India was in the “endgame” of the COVID-19 pandemic, justifying his government’s decision to export medical resources to other countries. India had increased its oxygen exports to other countries by a whopping 734 percent in January 2021. It also exported around 193 million doses of vaccines. But the picture changed drastically when India began recording a dramatic increase in new cases from April 15 onward, with more than 200,000 cases daily; now hospitals are running out of oxygen. On April 23, the Indian media reported that 25 critically ill COVID patients died due to oxygen shortages in a government hospital in Delhi.
ENDS
