In what is a stark contrast to last year, apartment authorities are delivering daily case updates within the building complexes. On April 18, it recorded 700 new cases, the highest one-day case spike in the state since the pandemic began last year. This leafy suburb of the Indian capital that lies in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh has a population of around 637,000-most of whom live in skyscrapers that dot the city skyline-and over 3,700 active cases. By 1 p.m., the numbers had swelled to over 50 people. Their ages varied from mid-thirties to late sixties, and all were waiting to discover possible damage from the coronavirus. From calm to chaos in a New Delhi suburbĮarly on the morning of April 22 at Kailash Hospital in Noida’s sector 71, a quiet, tree-lined residential area, at least ten people affected by the SARS-COV 2 virus were waiting for high-resolution compounded tomography-a sophisticated lung scan that is used to determine inflammation in COVID-19 patients. Indians are being turned away from vaccination centers because supplies have run out. “The surge took us by surprise and the system is now totally overwhelmed,” says Mishra. On April 23, the Indian media reported that 25 critically ill COVID patients died due to oxygen shortages in a government hospital in Delhi. But the picture changed drastically when India began recording a dramatic increase in new cases from April 15 onward, with more than 200,000 cases daily now hospitals are running out of oxygen. It also exported around 193 million doses of vaccines. India had increased its oxygen exports to other countries by a whopping 734 percent in January 2021. In March, a few weeks before the new surge, Indian health minister and physician Harsh Vardhan asserted that India was in the “ endgame” of the COVID-19 pandemic, justifying his government’s decision to export medical resources to other countries. “We kept warning that the pandemic was not over but no one was listening,” says Rakesh Mishra, senior principal scientist and director of the Hyderabad-based Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology, who is currently investigating whether a new homegrown variant-B.1.617-is behind India’s second surge.Īfter the first wave, Mishra says, the healthcare system moved on to tackle other medical emergencies that were neglected during the first wave, and dedicated COVID-19 facilities were converted back to their previous functions. But “there were still a fairly large proportion of people in the big cities, but also in smaller cities and villages, who were not exposed to the virus last year, who were susceptible.”Īs cases declined from September 2020 to mid-February 2021, the Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ignored warnings of a second wave, despite the fact that new variants were identified as far back as in January, according to media reports. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. "We completely let down our guard and assumed in January that the pandemic was over-and COVID surveillance and control took a back seat,” says K.
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