300,000 deaths

NEW DELHI • India reported yesterday morning another 4,454 deaths in 24 hours - the second-highest daily figure so far - which took its toll to 303,720.

Fatalities remained high despite the country flattening out the number of new cases in its devastating pandemic wave.

It became the third nation - after the United States and Brazil - to exceed 300,000 deaths from the coronavirus.

For several weeks, the country of 1.3 billion has been hitting record daily rises in infections and fatalities that have overwhelmed its healthcare system.

While the crisis has eased in major cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai, the virus is still spreading in rural areas and the southern states.

It has added the last 50,000 deaths in less than two weeks, government figures show. Experts said the real numbers of deaths and infections were probably much higher than official figures.

The official figure for the number of infections is currently 26.7 million.

"Deaths always will lag cases... People who have been diagnosed with infection now will go into hospital, and then a small number of them will die, but that will be later," Ashoka University biology professor Gautam Menon told Agence France-Presse yesterday.

The brutal wave has been accompanied by the emergence among coronavirus patients of thousands of cases of the usually rare infection mucormycosis, or "black fungus".

The government has given figures of between 5,424 and 8,848 for the number of these cases across India.

Normally, it records fewer than 20 cases a year. Doctors say one of the reasons behind the explosion in "black fungus" infections has been the excessive use of steroids on virus patients.

Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said imports of the main anti-fungal drug, amphotericin B, had started to arrive in the country amid a severe shortage.

The coronavirus wave has brought India's hospital system to its knees with severe shortages of oxygen and critical drugs. The government has been criticised for its response as long queues form for funerals at crematoriums and cemeteries.

Images of the bodies of people suspected to have died from Covid-19 floating in the holy Ganges River or buried in shallow graves have only added to the controversy.

Experts have warned that religious festivals and packed state election rallies held earlier in the year could have led to virus "super-spreader" events. There were also concerns that the B1617 variant, first detected in India last year, has contributed to the surge.

Mr Vardhan said the variant accounted for about 20 per cent of just under 26,000 samples from positive Covid-19 tests that have been genetically sequenced.

As part of its efforts to combat the pandemic, India has administered more than 196 million Covid-19 vaccination shots since mid-January.

But experts say the mass inoculation programme needs to be significantly stepped up. The country, home to the world's largest vaccine maker, has halted exports of vaccines to meet local demand.

Meanwhile, India's capital New Delhi will start relaxing its strict lockdown next week if new cases continue to drop in the city, its chief minister said on Sunday.

New Delhi, one of the worst-hit cities, went into lockdown on April 20, but new cases have declined in recent weeks and the test positivity rate has fallen below 2.5 per cent, compared with 36 per cent last month, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said.

"If cases continue to drop for a week, then from May 31, we will start the process of unlocking," he told a media conference.

He said that Delhi had reported about 1,600 new cases in the previous 24 hours.

Many states remain in lockdown, raising worries about the economic impact of the pandemic.

The state-run Indian Council of Medical Research said this month that districts with a high rate of infection should remain locked down for six to eight weeks to break the chain of transmission.

India's daily Covid-19 cases are decreasing after peaking on May 9. The government said on Sunday that it was conducting the highest number of Covid-19 tests, with more than 2.1 million samples tested in the previous 24 hours.

Still, experts have warned that India could face a third wave of infections in the coming months, and many states are unable to vaccinate those aged under 45 owing to a shortage of supplies. The world's largest vaccine-producing nation has fully vaccinated just over 41.6 million people, or only 3.8 per cent of its population.

Amid the crisis, India's crowded financial hub Mumbai won plaudits this year for tackling the second wave of the pandemic better than any other metropolis in the country, and it is gearing up to get ahead of a potential third wave that experts fear could affect children.

Mumbai is building four mammoth centres across the city with units for children infected with Covid-19 and is working closely with a special task force that includes some of India's top paediatricians, the city's civic chief said.

"If a two-year-old child becomes highly symptomatic, how can you deposit the child in hospital without the mother?" Mumbai's municipal commissioner Iqbal Singh Chahal told Reuters. "We have already started preparing for that... One should be faster than the virus."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, REUTERS