MUMBAI — Sagar Kishore Naharshetivar has been driving a van around southern India with his father lying in the back, hooked up to an oxygen …
MUMBAI — Sagar Kishore Naharshetivar has been driving a van around southern India with his father lying in the back, hooked up to an oxygen tank. His father has COVID-19 and needs treatment. This past week, they’ve tried hospitals in three different towns, even crossing state lines from Maharashtra to Telangana. All the hospitals are full. „We can’t find a hospital bed for him, but I can’t just take him home after all this, in his condition,“ Naharshetivar told local TV, speaking through a pink patterned bandana in lieu of a mask. They’ve been driving for 24 hours, he says. He glances back at his father, nervously. „His oxygen is running out.“ Some 800 miles away in the capital New Delhi, several COVID patients died on gurneys outside another hospital overnight Wednesday as relatives jostled them toward a crowded entrance. They couldn’t get through the door in time. On the other side of the country in Gujarat, in western India, a man sobs over the body of his relative, a cancer patient who’d also tested positive for the coronavirus and died in the parking lot of yet another overcrowded hospital, unable to get care. Arguments erupted over who was to blame. Ghastly scenes are playing out at hospitals and clinics across India, as the country’s health system collapses under a sudden spike in coronavirus cases. On Thursday, India confirmed nearly 315,000 new infections over the 24 hours preceding – the highest single-day tally for any country on any day since the pandemic began. As the health system breaks down, so does law and order: Oxygen tankers are traveling under police guard to fend off looters. Vaccines have been stolen from a hospital warehouse. And the black market trade in medical equipment has soared. People are stockpiling oxygen tanks at home, figuring there’s no use in even trying to get into a hospital anymore. Social media is full of desperate pleas from Indians seeking hospital beds, oxygen, anti-viral drugs, vaccines. One veteran journalist live-tweeted his declining oxygen levels, until he died. „I have never felt so desperate or helpless,“ Dr. Trupti Gilada said in a Facebook video she recorded of herself, weeping, as she huddled in her car outside the Mumbai hospital where she works. „We are seeing young people. We have a 35-year-old who’s on a ventilator. Please pray for our patients.“ Why the sudden spike? On graphs, India’s sudden spike in new infections shoots straight up like a wall, rather than a rising curve. The surge has bewildered Indians, coming just after their country’s caseload plummeted to record lows in February. „Popular belief in the country, from the public to policy-makers, was that India will not have a second wave – and unfortunately that let the guard down,“ says Dr. K. Srinath Reddy, an epidemiologist and public health expert who serves on a technical task force advising the Indian government on COVID-19. „It’s clear that the marked opening of society – with travel, local elections, religious gatherings, weddings – led to super-spreader events.
