India’s Hospitals Buckle Under Lethal Second Pandemic Wave

NEW DELHI - Hospitals in India are running desperately short of beds, medical oxygen and key drugs for coronavirus treatment as a lethal second wave of the pandemic brings the country’s health care system to a breaking point.      India reported 314,835 new COVID-19 infections Thursday, the highest one-day total posted by any nation during the year-long global pandemic.     The public health emergency in India is on a scale doctors have never seen before. “It is worse than a tsunami, worse than carpet bombing,” says Jalil Parkar, senior pulmonary consultant at Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai, India’s financial capital that boasts of some of the country’s best hospitals and medical infrastructure.      In locked-down cities, the wail of ambulance sirens is the only sound that breaks the silence on streets and the only crowds seen are outside hospitals and crematoriums as families scramble to get beds or cremate loved ones.       “The influx of patients is so much that we have to treat patients on the wheelchair, sometimes in the ambulance itself and we are doing our best,” according to Parkar.        

 As oxygen ran scarce, the Delhi High Court ordered the federal government to divert oxygen from industries to hospitals. “You can’t have people die because there is no oxygen," a two-judge bench said late on Wednesday. "Beg, borrow or steal, it is a national emergency.”     The order came after one of the city’s leading private sector hospital chains, Max Healthcare, told the court that most of its hospitals were working on “dangerously low levels of oxygen supply.”     Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called India’s second wave a “storm.”      “The corona crisis has led to a huge demand for oxygen throughout the country,” Modi said in a nationwide address Tuesday night. “We are taking steps to address this very quickly.” He said authorities were working with states and private firms to deliver oxygen with speed.     It will be too late for many already mourning dead relatives.      As the virus ravaged Delhi, doctors said they were flooded with endless calls from desperate people seeking help for beds and oxygen.   “My phone kept ringing all night. People said my son is dying, mother-in-law is dying, or another relative is suffering, so I am troubling you. I had the same request from all – their oxygen level is falling, where should they go?” said Arvind Kumar, a chest surgeon at Medanta Hospital in Gurugram, an affluent business district near New Delhi.   “I don’t think even nightmare is a correct word which expresses the gravity of the situation. There is not a single hospital bed in Delhi today,” Kumar said.   The northern Haryana state ordered police to escort vehicles carrying oxygen cylinders after authorities said one tanker was looted. Local television showed people crowding with empty oxygen cylinders around refilling facilities in the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh. Social media has become a helpline filled with pleas for getting beds or oxygen.      India’s health minister, Harsh Vardhan, said that to address the exponential spike in demand, the government has increased the quota of oxygen for the seven worst-hit states in the country.