[The Supreme Court ordered the
government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to come up with a national oxygen
distribution plan as coronavirus cases continue to set records.]
India recorded
more than 330,000 new cases in 24 hours, the health ministry said on
Friday, the second consecutive day that the country has set
a global record for daily infections. The reported death toll on
Friday was more than 2,200, also a new high for the country.
About half of the cases in Delhi,
the capital city of more than 20 million people, are testing positive for a
more contagious variant of the virus, first detected last year in India, that
is afflicting younger people, said a health ministry official, Sujeet Singh.
It is unclear to what extent the
variant is driving the surge in cases around the country, with large gatherings
of unmasked people and widespread neglect of preventive measures also
suspected.
As India’s catastrophic second wave
of the coronavirus deepened on Friday, Canada joined Britain, Hong Kong,
Singapore and New Zealand in barring travelers from the country. The U.S. State
Department advised people against going to India after the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention raised the country’s risk level to its highest measure.
“Demand for hospital beds and
medical supplies have taxed the health care system to capacity in many cities,
and critical care bed space is severely limited,” the travel advisory said.
With the mutant strain of the virus
racing through Delhi, the capital territory’s government has imposed a weeklong
lockdown. That has stranded thousands of people who rely on daily wages,
leaving many to camp on the banks of the Yamuna River, where they survive on a
Sikh temple’s twice-daily food deliveries.
In Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai
and is one of India’s worst-hit states, a hospital fire attributed to a faulty
air-conditioning unit killed at least 13 Covid-19 patients on Friday. Two days
before, at
least 22 patients were killed in a hospital in the city of Nashik,
also in Maharashtra, after a leak cut off their oxygen supplies.
Facing a barrage of criticism for
his government’s handling of the second wave, Prime Minister Narendra Modi
canceled plans to travel to West Bengal for a campaign rally ahead of an
election in that state.
Even as cases have climbed, Mr.
Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party and other parties have continued
to hold mass rallies with thousands of people unmasked. The government
has also allowed an enormous Hindu festival to draw millions of pilgrims
despite signs that
it has accelerated the spread of the virus.
“Leadership really matters. We saw
the early loosening of appropriate measures. Election rallies continued, and
religious festivals turned into superspreader events,” said Krishna Udayakumar,
an associate professor of global health and director of the Duke Global Health
Innovation Center.
“There was perhaps a lost
opportunity to learn from the first wave,” Mr. Udayakumar said. That initial
wave peaked in August and September, months after India abandoned a nationwide
lockdown that crippled the economy.
The disaster now consuming India is
playing out vividly on social media, with Twitter feeds and WhatsApp groups
broadcasting hospitals’ pleas for oxygen and medicines, and families’ desperate
searches for beds in overwhelmed Covid-19 wards. With many hospitals short of
ventilators, television news reports have shown patients lying inside
ambulances parked outside emergency rooms, struggling to breathe.
Swati Maliwal, an activist and
politician in Delhi, tweeted that her grandfather had died while waiting
outside a hospital in Greater Noida, near New Delhi.
“I kept standing there for half
hour and pleading for admission and nothing happened,” she wrote. “Shame!
Pathetic!”
On April 15, the
health ministry said in a statement that India had a daily production
capacity of about 7,700 tons of oxygen, with 55,000 tons in reserve. Not all of
it goes to medical use — some is used for industrial purposes, including
India’s enormous steel-making industry.
On April 21, a government official
told the Delhi High Court that medical demand had reached 8,800 tons per day,
beyond the daily production capacity.
Mr. Modi’s government is in charge
of allocating the national oxygen supplies, and on Thursday, India’s Supreme
Court gave the government a week to come up with a “national plan” for
distribution. The health ministry was told to issue a purchase order to import
55,000 additional tons of oxygen.
Oxygen is difficult to store and
transport, and isn’t generally manufactured near India’s biggest cities, which
are now reeling from the sudden spikes in cases.
States have accused each other of
hoarding oxygen and blocking tankers at border crossings. Looters stole several
cylinders of oxygen from a tanker making a delivery to a hospital in the state
of Madhya Pradesh.
At least three states, including
Madhya Pradesh, have asked Mr. Modi’s government to send so-called Oxygen
Express trains with large oxygen tanks for hospitals.
On Thursday, Fortis Healthcare, one
of India’s top hospital chains, tweeted an S.O.S. message to Mr. Modi and his
chief deputy, Amit Shah, the minister for home affairs, appealing for more oxygen at a hospital in Haryana
State, on the Delhi border.
“Fortis Hospital in #Haryana has
only 45 minutes of oxygen left,” the company wrote, asking government officials
“to act immediately and help us save patients’ lives.”
Four hours later, the hospital
received a tanker, the company tweeted.
It wasn’t clear whether every
hospital with a critical need for oxygen was getting it in time.
Arvind Kejriwal, the top elected
official in Delhi, said that the city needed a daily supply of 770 tons of
oxygen. Mr. Modi’s government has allocated 530 tons.
At A.I.I.M.S. Hospital in Delhi,
India’s premier research hospital, contact tracing among health care workers
was suspended because there weren’t enough personnel to spare for the exercise,
according to Srinivas Rajkumar, a representative for the resident doctors’
association.
Beginning on Saturday, all
residents of India age 18 or older can register for a Covid-19 vaccine, but
demand is expected to far outstrip supply. So far, more than 135 million people
have received at least one dose, about a tenth of India’s population of nearly
1.4 billion. Two vaccines have received emergency use authorization, with at
least five others in the pipeline.
A makeshift Covid hospital in
Mumbai’s Bandra neighborhood was well supplied with oxygen, but the nearby
vaccination center halted operations after running out of vaccine.
Karan Deep Singh contributed
reporting.
Emily Schmall is a South Asia
correspondent based in New Delhi. @emilyschmall