Krutika Pathi and Sheikh Saaliq report for the Associated Press from New Delhi on the latest situation in India. They say that there is no room at Sion hospital in Mumbai – approximately all 500 beds reserved for Covid patients are occupied. And with new patients coming in daily, a doctor said the hospital is being forced to add beds every second day.
Waiting lists in some hospitals in the city are so unreasonable that “numbers can’t define the burden on hospitals”, said Dr Om Shrivastava, an infectious diseases expert.
Scenes like this were common last year, when India looked set to become the worst-affected country with daily cases nearly surpassing 100,000. For several months, infections had receded, baffling experts, but since February, cases have climbed faster than before with a seven-day rolling average of 59,000. On Thursday, India reported more than 72,000 cases, its highest rise in six months.
“I think it’s going to be worse (than last year),” said Shrivastava. “If it doesn’t quell in a few months time, we may be in for the long haul.”
Experts say there is a pressing need for India to bolster vaccinations, which started sluggishly in January. The country is expanding its drive to include everyone over 45 from Thursday.
After a grinding lockdown and falling cases, life in India had returned to normal in many places. Markets are teeming with people, politicians are addressing massive rallies in local elections and a religious gathering in Uttarakhand state is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of devotees in April.
International travel has also resumed in high volumes, bringing in variants first detected in the UK, South Africa and Brazil. India also confirmed a new and potentially troublesome variant at home. Officials have cautioned against linking the variants to the surge, and experts say more expansive genomic analysis is needed to determine how much they are contributing to the rise.
“It’s a perfect storm of careless crowd behaviour, laxity in government vigilance and a misleading perception of herd immunity,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “The virus rode through gates which were left wide open.”
