Deaths cross quarter-million as variants rampage across rural India

NEW DELHI • India's coronavirus death toll crossed a quarter million yesterday, in the deadliest 24 hours since the pandemic began, as the disease rampaged through the countryside, overloading a fragile rural healthcare system.

Boosted by highly infectious variants, the second wave erupted in February to inundate hospitals and medical staff, as well as crematoriums and mortuaries.

Experts are still unable to say with certainty when the figures will peak.

Deaths swelled by a record 4,205 while infections rose 348,421 yesterday, carrying the tally past 23 million, health ministry data showed. But experts believe the actual numbers could be five to 10 times higher.

Funeral pyres have blazed in city carparks and scores of bodies have washed up on the banks of the Ganges River, apparently immersed by relatives whose villages were stripped bare of the wood needed for cremations.

Lacking beds, drugs and medical oxygen, many hospitals in the world's second-most populous country have been forced to turn away droves of sufferers, while tales of desperate relatives searching for treatment for their dying loved ones have become sickeningly commonplace.

Many victims die without a doctor on hand to issue a death certificate and even when a doctor is available, Covid-19 is not specified as the cause of death unless the deceased had been tested for the disease, which few have been.

Although the infection curve may be showing early signs of flattening, new cases are likely to fall off only slowly, according to virologist Shahid Jameel. "We seem to be plateauing around 400,000 cases a day," the Indian Express newspaper quoted him as saying. "It is still too early to say whether we have reached the peak."

India, with a population of 1.4 billion, accounts for half of all virus cases reported globally last week and 30 per cent of deaths worldwide, the World Health Organisation said in its latest weekly report.

The full impact of the B.1.617 variant found in India, which the WHO has designated as being of global concern, is not yet clear, it added.

Dr Balram Bhargava, head of the main Indian health agency res-ponding to the coronavirus, has said districts where over 10 per cent of those tested have the disease should remain locked down for another six to eight weeks to control the spread.

Currently, three-quarters of India's 718 districts have what is known as a test-positivity rate above 10 per cent, including major cities like New Delhi, Mumbai and the tech hub of Bengaluru.

Meanwhile, the Singapore Red Cross said in a statement that 1,300 oxygen cylinders, three ISO cryogenic tanks and five ventilators have arrived in India and are being distributed to public hospitals and other healthcare support institutions.

"Further shipments comprising over 4 million surgical masks, 1.5 million N95 masks, 2,000 oxygen concentrators, 1,200 oxygen cylinders and 150 ventilators are expected to arrive over the coming weeks," it said yesterday.

REUTERS