Record infections overwhelm India’s hospitals

• 13 patients died in a hospital fire

NEW DELHI: Delhi hospitals issued desperate appeals for oxygen on Friday and 13 Covid-19 patients died in a fire, as India’s healthcare system buckles under a new wave of infections.

The surge, blamed on a new virus variant and recent “super spreader” public events, brought 330,000 new infections — a world record — and 2,000 deaths reported in the past 24 hours.

The latest in a string of fires at hospitals broke out on the outskirts of Mumbai early Friday morning and killed 13 Covid-19 patients, a local official told AFP.

India’s healthcare system has long been underfunded and the new Covid-19 outbreak has caused critical shortages in oxygen, drugs and hospital beds, sparking desperate pleas for help.

Earlier this week, 22 Covid-19 patients died at another hospital in the same state of Maharashtra when the oxygen supply to their ventilators was disrupted by a leak.

India has recorded more than four million infections this month, dashing hopes at the start of the year that it may have seen the worst of the pandemic.

This belief led the government to lower its guard, allowing most activity to return almost to normal, including weddings and permitting spectators at cricket matches.

The vast Kumbh Mela festival, one of the world’s biggest religious gatherings, held in the city of Haridwar between January and this week, attracted an estimated 25 million Hindu pilgrims, mostly without masks or social distancing.

Several state elections have meant big campaign rallies.

“The government has been caught with its pants down,” call centre executive Navneet Singh, 38, told AFP.

Many crematoriums and graveyards are struggling to cope. People were desperately queueing outside hospitals and begging for help on social media.

This includes Modi’s home state Gujarat, where patients waited for ambulances, gasping for oxygen, outside overwhelmed hospitals. Many private hospitals there have no cylinders left.

The state’s medical oxygen needs have soared more than 13-fold since the end of March, a senior government official said. In Rajkot, bodies were being cremated in open ground outside the city.

Many parts of the country have now tightened restrictions, with the capital in lockdown and all non-essential services banned in Maharashtra. The northern state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 240 million people, goes into a shutdown this weekend, as will Karnataka, home to IT hub Bangalore.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva that the Indian situation was “a devastating reminder of what this virus can do”.