MONITORING (SW) \u2013 India has topped the world with new coronavirus cases on fourth consecutive day on Sunday with 349,691 new cases.<\/p>\n
Health authorities in India confirmed 2,767 deaths in this period with the capital, Delhi, becoming one of the worst-hit areas.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0preventable 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.<\/p>\n
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,\u00a0according to media reports.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe kept warning that the pandemic was not over but no one was listening,\u201d 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\u2014B.1.617\u2014is behind India\u2019s second surge.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In March, a few weeks before the new surge,\u00a0Indian health minister and physician Harsh Vardhan asserted that India was in the\u00a0\u201cendgame\u201d of the COVID-19 pandemic, justifying his government\u2019s decision to export medical resources to other countries. India had\u00a0increased its oxygen exports\u00a0to other countries by a whopping\u00a0734 percent in January 2021. It also exported around\u00a0193 million doses\u00a0of 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.<\/p>\n
ENDS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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