Por Sanjeev Miglani y Sudarshan Varadhan
NEW DELHI, Apr 25 (Reuters) – Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged all citizens to get vaccinated and exercise caution, saying a “storm” of infections had rocked India after the country set a new world record with the most COVID-19 infections in one day.
The United States said it was deeply concerned about the massive increase in coronavirus cases in India and would send aid quickly.
The number of cases increased by 349,691 in the last 24 hours, the fourth consecutive day of record peaks. Hospitals in Delhi and across the country are turning patients away after running out of medical oxygen and without beds.
“We were confident, our spirits were high after successfully facing the first wave, but this storm has shaken the nation,” Modi said in a radio address.
His government has faced criticism for letting its guard down earlier this year, when large religious and political gatherings were allowed to take place as cases dropped below 10,000 a day.
Hospitals and doctors have issued urgent notices saying they cannot cope with the flood of patients.
Outside a Sikh temple in Delhi’s city of Ghaziabad, the street resembled a hospital emergency room, crammed with cars carrying COVID-19 patients trying to breathe connected to portable oxygen tanks.
Elsewhere, families were deploying stretchers and oxygen cylinders outside hospitals while desperately pleading with authorities to receive patients, Reuters photographers said.
“Every day, it’s the same situation, we have two hours of oxygen left,” said a doctor on television.
Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, extended a lockdown in the capital for a week that was due to end on Monday. COVID-19 is killing one person every four minutes in the city.
Epidemiologists and virologists say that more infectious variants of the virus, including an Indian one known as B.1.6.1.7, have fueled the fierce increase in cases.
Doctors at the Indian Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi have found that one patient is infecting up to nine out of ten contacts, compared to the scenario of four last year.
India, a country of 1.3 billion people, has recorded a total of 16.96 million infections and 192,311 deaths from coronavirus, after 2,767 more died in recent hours, according to data from the Health Ministry.
In the last month alone, daily cases have increased eightfold and deaths tenfold. Health experts say the death toll is likely much higher.
“Our hearts go out to the Indian people in the midst of the horrible COVID-19 outbreak,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Twitter.
“We are working closely with our partners in the government of India, and we will rapidly deploy additional support to the people of India and the heroes of Indian healthcare.”
(Additional information from Euan Rocha, Aditi Shah, Aditya Kalra, Krishna N Das and Rupam Jain and Michael Nienaber, Edited by Edwina Gibbs, Michael Perry and Frances Kerry, edited in Spanish by Gabriela Donoso)
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