Tag Archives: Death

Russia reports record 737 COVID-19 deaths, changes entry rules

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia on Tuesday reported a record 737 deaths from coronavirus-linked causes in the past 24 hours as the country stepped up efforts to vaccinate its population of more than 144 million people.

A new surge in COVID-19 cases in June was blamed on the new, highly infectious, Delta variant. Moscow responded with mandatory vaccination for a wide group of citizens, a model adopted by other regions, sparking wide public discontent ahead of September parliamentary elections.

Health minister Mikhail Murashko said up to 850,000 people were being vaccinated against COVID-19 in Russia every day, and that building immunity across the population was key, the TASS new agency reported.

Murashko said foreign producers of COVID-19 vaccines had applied to register in Russia, without disclosing their names.

Russia has so far offered its own vaccines against the novel coronavirus, launching a mass vaccination campaign in late 2020.

From Wednesday, Russia will change the rules for citizens returning from abroad, scrapping the obligation to undergo two PCR tests upon arrival, a decree published on Tuesday and signed by Anna Popova, head of the consumer health watchdog, showed.

From July 7, all those vaccinated or officially recovered from COVID-19 do not need to take a PCR test. Those who do not fall into these two categories when they enter Russia, will need to self-isolate before receiving results of one PCR test.

In the past day, Russia has confirmed 23,378 new COVID-19 cases, including 5,498 in Moscow, taking the official national tally since the pandemic began to 5,658,672.

The Kremlin said it would not support the idea of closing borders between Russia’s regions to stop the virus from spreading, although some regions may take swift and harsh measures to withstand the pandemic.

The recent surge in COVID-19 cases, along with the need to raise interest rates to combat inflation, are seen challenging economic growth in Russia this year.

(Reporting by Andrey Ostroukh and Gleb Stolyarov; additional reporting by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Catherine Evans, William Maclean)

Factbox: Latest on the worldwide spread of the coronavirus

(Reuters) – The Euro 2020 soccer tournament was blamed for a surge in cases as fans have flocked to stadiums, bars and spectator zones across Europe to watch the action while the pandemic still raged.

DEATHS AND INFECTIONS

EUROPE

* Europe’s drug regulator said the vaccines approved in the European Union offered protection against all coronavirus variants, including Delta, but called for active monitoring by vaccine manufacturers to stay alert.

* Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was confident Britons fully vaccinated against COVID-19 would be able to travel abroad this year.

* A 10-week decline in new infections across Europe has come to an end and a new wave of infections is inevitable if citizens and lawmakers do not remain disciplined, the head of WHO in Europe, Hans Kluge, told a news briefing.

ASIA-PACIFIC

* President Joko Widodo said that Indonesia will impose emergency measures until July 20 to contain an exponential spike in cases that has strained the medical system.

* Japan is considering an extension of two weeks to a month for coronavirus prevention measures in Tokyo and other areas, Japanese media said.

AMERICAS

* Bolivia’s government is looking to stabilize the country’s economy, which last year plunged the most in over half a century, with a mix of fiscal spending, vaccines and gold.

* Dominican health authorities will on Thursday begin distributing a third dose of vaccine in an effort to protect against more contagious new variants.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* The United States will begin shipping the first batch of vaccines it has donated to Africa from this weekend, a special envoy of the African Union said, as the continent sees a surge in cases fueled by variants.

* The South African Medical Association threatened to take the government to court because scores of new junior doctors cannot find work placements despite staff shortages during the pandemic.

* Police in Uganda have arrested two nurses and were hunting for a man who had posed as a doctor to sell and administer fake vaccines to hundreds of people, authorities said, amid a rising second wave of infections.

MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS

* Indian drugmaker Zydus Cadila said it has applied for emergency use approval of its three-dose vaccine that showed efficacy of 66.6% in an interim study and could become the second home-grown shot if regulators consent.

* CureVac said its COVID-19 vaccine was 48% effective in the final analysis of its pivotal mass trial, only marginally better than the 47% reported after an initial read-out two weeks ago.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

* Global stock markets rose on strong European and U.S. shares on Thursday, with stocks brushing off a rapid re-acceleration in coronavirus cases and oil and the dollar extending their first-half rallies.

* Mexico’s factories deteriorated for a 16th straight month in June amid the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and local restrictions, though the pace of contraction was the slowest since the effects of the pandemic first hit Mexico, a survey showed.

* Turkey’s pandemic-era ban on layoffs and a government wage support system, both adopted in early 2020, expired as most remaining restrictions were also lifted, setting the stage for a rise in unemployment.

* The IMF’s executive board approved the second review of Jordan’s four-year reform program and commended it for meeting its fiscal targets despite the fallout from the coronavirus, the finance ministry said.

(Compiled by Federico Maccioni, Amy Caren Daniel and Jagoda Darlak; Edited William Maclean)

Factbox: Latest on the worldwide spread of the coronavirus

(Reuters) – Olympics organizers capped the number of spectators at 10,000 for each venue of the 2020 Tokyo Games, days after experts said holding the event without fans was the least risky option during the pandemic.

DEATHS AND INFECTIONS

EUROPE

* President Vladimir Putin said the coronavirus situation in some Russian regions was getting worse as authorities began promoting the idea of regular revaccinations to try to halt a surge in cases.

* French nightclubs will be allowed to re-open from July 9, government minister Alain Griset said, allowing the industry to operate for the first time since it was shut during the France’s COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020.

* As the Delta coronavirus variant continues to spread, Portuguese authorities are scrambling to bring a spike in cases under control and said they would accelerate vaccinations and increase testing.

ASIA-PACIFIC

* India’s government is in talks with Pfizer and other vaccine manufacturers to import their COVID-19 vaccines in accordance with local laws, a senior government official said.

* Indonesia passed the mark of 2 million coronavirus cases after a record number of new infections, as authorities announced a tightening of restrictions to contain the spread in the world’s fourth most populous country.

* Hong Kong said it would shorten the quarantine period for vaccinated people arriving in the city to seven days from 14, provided travelers show sufficient antibodies against the novel coronavirus.

* Taiwan welcomed 2.5 million vaccine doses from the United States on Sunday as help from a true friend. China’s foreign ministry urged the United States not to seek “political manipulation” in the name of vaccine assistance.

* Well above 80% of the athletes and officials residing in the Olympic village will be vaccinated when the Games kick off, the International Olympic Committee President said.

AMERICAS

* Canada will start cautiously lifting border restrictions for fully vaccinated citizens and other eligible people on July 5 but U.S. and other foreign travelers will still be excluded, the government said.

* U.S. land borders with Canada and Mexico will remain closed to non-essential travel until at least July 21, the U.S. Homeland Security Department said.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* Africa is working with the European Union and other partners to help create regional vaccine manufacturing hubs in Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa, with Nigeria under consideration, World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said.

* An Israeli health official urged more 12- to 15-year-olds to be vaccinated, citing new outbreaks that he attributed to the Delta variant.

* Qatar will only allow people fully vaccinated to attend next year’s World Cup and is in talks to secure one million doses, the prime minister said.

MEDICAL DEVELOPMENTS

* GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology said final results from a late-stage study of their monoclonal antibody confirmed it significantly reduced hospitalization and death among high-risk COVID-19 patients when given early in the disease.

* Cuba’s Soberana 2 vaccine candidate has shown 62% efficacy with just two of its three doses, state-run biopharmaceutical corporation BioCubaFarma said on Saturday.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

* Global stocks dropped to a four-week low after last week’s surprise hawkish shift by the U.S. Federal Reserve reduced the allure of riskier assets, while the dollar held gains and stood near a 10-week high.

(Compiled by Veronica Snoj and Juliette Portala. Edited by Shounak Dasgupta, Mark Heinrich and Barbara Lewis)

U.S. COVID-19 deaths cross painful 600,000 milestone as country reopens

By Sharon Bernstein

(Reuters) – The United States has now lost over 600,000 mothers, fathers, children, siblings and friends to COVID-19, a painful reminder that death, sickness and grief continue even as the country begins to return to something resembling pre-pandemic normal.

A bride forced by the pandemic to have a Zoom wedding is planning a lavish in-person anniversary celebration this summer, but all of the guests must attest they are vaccinated.

A Houston artist, still deep in grief, is working on a collage of images of people who died in her community. Others crowd theaters and bars, saying it is time to move on.

“There will be no tears – not even happy tears,” said Ali Whitman, who will celebrate her first wedding anniversary in August by donning her gown and partying with 240 vaccinated friends and family members in New Hampshire.

COVID-19 nearly killed her mother. She spent her wedding day last year with 13 people in person while an aunt conducted the ceremony via Zoom.

“I would be remiss not to address how awful and how terrible the past year has been, but also the gratitude that I can be in a singular place with all the people in my life who mean so much to me,” said Whitman, 30.

The United States passed 600,000 COVID-19 deaths on Monday, about 15% of the world’s total coronavirus fatalities of around 4 million, a Reuters tally shows.

The rate of severe illness and death has dropped dramatically as more Americans have become vaccinated, creating something of a psychological whiplash that plagues the millions whose lives have been touched by the disease. Many are eager to emerge from more than a year of sickness and lockdown, yet they still suffer – from grief, lingering symptoms, economic trauma or the isolation of lockdown.

“We’ve all lived through this awful time, and all of us have been affected one way or another,” said Erika Stein, who has suffered from migraines, fatigue and cognitive issues since contracting COVID-19 last fall. “My world flipped upside down in the last year and a half – and that’s been hard.”

Stein, 34, was active and fit, working as a marketing executive and fitness instructor in Virginia outside Washington, D.C., before the initial illness and related syndrome known as long-COVID ravaged her life.

Like many, she has mixed feelings about how quickly cities and states have moved to lift pandemic restrictions and re-open.

‘FOR MY FAMILY, THERE IS NO NORMAL’

In New York, social worker Shyvonne Noboa still cries talking about the disease that ravaged her family, infecting 14 out of 17 relatives and killing her beloved grandfather, who died alone in a hospital where they could not visit him.

She breaks down when she goes to Target and sees the well-stocked aisles, recalling the pandemic’s depths, when she could not find hand sanitizer to protect her family.

“New York City is going back to quote-unquote ‘normal’ and opening up, but I can assure you that for my family there is no normal,” said Noboa, who lives in Queens, an early epicenter of the U.S. outbreak. She is vaccinated but still wears a mask when she is out, and plans to continue doing so in the near future.

In Houston, artist Joni Zavitsanos started looking up obituaries of people in Southeast Texas who had died in the pandemic’s early days, reading their stories and creating mixed-media memorials displaying their names and photographs. Around each person she painted a halo using gold leaf, an homage to the Byzantine art of the Greek Orthodox church she attends.

Zavitsanos has now created about 575 images, and plans to keep going, making as many as she can, each portrait on an eight-by-eight-inch piece of wood to be mounted together to form an installation. Her brother and three adult children contracted COVID-19 and recovered. A very close friend nearly died and is still struggling with rehabilitation.

Chris Kocher, who founded the support and advocacy group COVID Survivors for Change, urged sympathy and support for people who are still grieving.

“We’re being given this false choice where you can open up and celebrate, or you need to be locked down in grief,” he said. “Let’s be thankful that people are getting vaccinated, but let’s also acknowledge that going back to normal is not an option for millions of Americans.”

One way to acknowledge the toll that COVID-19 has taken is to incorporate the color yellow into celebrations and gatherings, or display a yellow heart, which for some has become a symbol of those lost to the disease, he said.

The bittersweet mix of grief at the pandemic’s toll with relief brought by its ebb was clear at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on Thursday, where Stephanie Aviles and her family waited for a cousin to arrive from Puerto Rico.

Aviles, 23, lost two close friends to the virus, and her father nearly died. And yet, here she was, greeting family she had not been able to see for 15 months as the pandemic raged.

“I’m grateful, but it’s a lot,” she said. “It’s a strange feeling to be normal again.”

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Indian state sharply raises COVID-19 death toll prompting call for wide review

By Manas Mishra and Neha Arora

BENGALURU/ NEW DELHI (Reuters) – An Indian state has raised its COVID-19 death toll sharply higher after the discovery of thousands of unreported cases, lending weight to suspicion that India’s overall death tally is significantly more than the official figure.

Indian hospitals ran out of beds and life-saving oxygen during a devastating second wave of coronavirus in April and May and people died in parking lots outside hospitals and at their homes.

Many of those deaths were not recorded in COVID-19 tallies, doctors and health experts say.

India has the second-highest tally of COVID-19 infections in the world after the United States, with 29.2 million cases and 359,676 deaths, according to health ministry data.

But the discovery of several thousand unreported deaths in the state of Bihar has raised suspicion that many more coronavirus victims have not been included in official figures.

The health department in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, revised its total COVID-19 related death toll to more than 9,429 from about 5,424 on Wednesday.

The newly reported deaths had occurred last month and state officials were investigating the lapse, a district health official said, blaming the oversight on private hospitals.

“These deaths occurred 15 days ago and were only uploaded now in the government portal. Action will be taken against some of the private hospitals,” said the official, who declined to be identified as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Health experts say they believe both coronavirus infections and deaths are being significantly undercounted across the country partly because test facilities are rare in rural areas, where two-thirds of Indians live, and hospitals are few and far between.

Many people have fallen ill and died at home without being tested for the coronavirus.

‘WIDESPREAD PROBLEM’

As crematoriums struggled to handle the wave of deaths over the past two months, many families placed bodies in the holy Ganges river or buried them in shallow graves on its sandbanks.

Those people would likely not have been registered as COVID victims.

“Under-reporting is a widespread problem, not necessarily deliberate, often because of inadequacies,” Rajib Dasgupta, head of the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Reuters.

“In the rural context, whatever states may say or claim, testing is not simple, easy or accessible,” Dasgupta said.

Overall, India’s cases and deaths have fallen steadily in the past weeks after a surge from mid-March.

The official total of cases stood at 29.2 million on Thursday after rising by 94,052 in the previous 24 hours, while total fatalities were at 359,676, according to data from the health ministry.

The New York Times estimated deaths based on death counts over time and infection fatality rates and put India’s toll at 600,000 to 1.6 million.

The government dismissed those estimates as exaggerated. But the main opposition Congress party said that other states must follow Bihar’s example and conduct a review of deaths over the past two months.

“This proves beyond a doubt government has been hiding COVID deaths, ” said Shama Mohamed, a spokeswoman for Congress, adding that an audit should also be ordered in the big states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.

(Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru and Neha Arora in New Delhi; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

‘A hell out here’: COVID-19 ravages rural India

By Danish Siddiqui and Sanjeev Miglani

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -India’s coronavirus death toll crossed 250,000 on Wednesday in the deadliest 24 hours since the pandemic began, as the disease rampaged through the countryside, leaving families to weep over the dead in rural hospitals or camp in wards to tend the sick.

Boosted by highly infectious variants, the second wave erupted in February to inundate hospitals and medical staff, as well as crematoriums and mortuaries. Experts still cannot say for sure when the figures will peak.

Indian state leaders clamored for vaccines to stop the second wave and the devastation that it has wrought, urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to stop exporting vaccines, ramp up production and help them procure urgent supplies from overseas.

“People will die in the same way in the third and fourth waves as they have this time” without more vaccines, Delhi’s Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia told reporters.

Deaths grew by a record 4,205 while infections rose 348,421 in the 24 hours to Wednesday, taking the tally past 23 million, health ministry data showed. Experts believe the actual numbers could be five to 10 times higher.

Funeral pyres have blazed in city parking lots, and bodies have washed up on the banks of the holy river Ganges, immersed by relatives whose villages were stripped bare of the wood needed for cremations.

Lacking beds, drugs and oxygen, many hospitals in the world’s second-most populous nation have been forced to turn away droves of sufferers.

“We seem to be plateauing around 400,000 cases a day,” the Indian Express newspaper quoted virologist Shahid Jameel as saying. “It is still too early to say whether we have reached the peak.”

‘HERE AND NOW’

India is using the AstraZeneca vaccine made at the Serum Institute in the western city of Pune and Covaxin by Bharat Biotech but has fully vaccinated barely 2.5% of the population.

Indians need vaccines “here and now”, the chief minister of West Bengal state, Mamata Banerjee, said in a letter to Modi.

The country accounts for half of COVID-19 cases and 30% of deaths worldwide, the World Health Organization 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.

The variant has been detected in six countries in the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization said, adding that it was worried that it was highly transmissible.

Britain, which has also detected the variant, is looking at all possible solutions to tackle a surge of related cases, including in the northern English town of Bolton, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told parliament.

RURAL SPREAD

Daily infections are shooting up in the Indian countryside in comparison to big towns, where they have slowed after last month’s surge, experts say.

More than half the cases this week in the western state of Maharashtra were in rural areas, up from a third a month ago. That share is nearly two-thirds in the most populous, and mainly rural, state of Uttar Pradesh, government data showed.

Television showed images of people weeping over the bodies of loved ones in ramshackle rural hospitals while others camped in wards tending to the sick.

A pregnant woman was taking care of her husband who had breathing difficulties in a hospital in Bhagalpur in the eastern state of Bihar, which is seeing a case surge its health system could barely have handled at the best of times.

“There is no doctor here, she sleeps the whole night here, taking care of her husband,” the woman’s brother told India Today television.

In a corridor outside, two sons were wailing over the body of their father, saying repeatedly that he could have been saved if only he had been given a bed in an intensive care unit.

At the general hospital in Bijnor, a town in northern Uttar Pradesh, a woman lay in a cot next to a garbage can and medical waste.

“How can someone get treated if the situation is like this?” asked her son, Sudesh Tyagi. “It is a hell out here.”

(Reporting by Anuron Kumar Mitra and Manas Mishra in Bengaluru, Shilpa Jamkhandikar and Aishwarya Nair in Mumbai, Tanvi Mehta in New Delhi, Subrata Nagchoudhary in Kolkata and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Raju Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore, Clarence Fernandez, Mark Heinrich and Giles Elgood)

Bodies float down Ganges as nearly 4,000 more die of COVID in India

By Saurabh Sharma

LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) -Scores of bodies are washing up on the banks of the Ganges as Indians fail to keep pace with the deaths and cremations of around 4,000 people a day from the novel coronavirus.

India currently accounts for one in three of the reported deaths from coronavirus around the world, according to a Reuters tally, and its health system is overwhelmed, despite donations of oxygen cylinders and other medical equipment from around the world.

Rural parts of India not only have more rudimentary healthcare, but are now also running short of wood for traditional Hindu cremations.

Authorities said on Tuesday they were investigating the discovery of scores of bodies found floating down the Ganges in two separate states.

“As of now it is very difficult for us to say where these dead bodies have come from,” said M P Singh, the top government official in Ghazipur district, in Uttar Pradesh.

Akhand Pratap, a local resident, said that “people are immersing bodies in the holy Ganges river instead of cremation because of shortage of cremation wood.”

Even in the capital, New Delhi, many COVID victims are abandoned by their relatives after cremation, leaving volunteers to wash the ashes, pray over them, and then take them to scatter into the river in the holy city of Haridwar, 180 km (110 miles) away.

“Our organization collects these remains from all the crematoriums and performs the last rituals in Haridwar so that they can achieve salvation,” said Ashish Kashyap, a volunteer from the charity Shri Deodhan Sewa Samiti.

QUARTER OF A MILLION DEAD

The seven-day average of daily infections hit a record 390,995 on Tuesday, with 3,876 deaths, according to the health ministry.

Official COVID-19 deaths, which experts say are almost certainly under-reported, stand at just under a quarter of a million.

The World Health Organization said on Monday that it regarded the coronavirus variant first identified in India last year as a variant of global concern, with some preliminary studies showing that it spreads more easily.

Late that day, 11 people died in the government SVR Ruia hospital in the southern city of Tirupati because a tanker carrying oxygen arrived late.

“There were issues with oxygen pressure due to low availability. It all happened within a span of five minutes,” said M Harinarayan, the district’s senior civil servant.

Vaccines are also running short, especially in Maharashtra state around the financial center of Mumbai, and in the capital, Delhi, two of India’s hardest-hit regions.

“We are ready to buy doses, but they are not available right now,” Maharashtra health minister Rajesh Tope told reporters.

India’s second wave of the pandemic has increased calls for a nationwide lockdown and prompted more and more states to impose tougher restrictions that have hurt businesses and the wider economy.

Production of the Apple iPhone 12 at a Foxconn factory in the southern state of Tamil Nadu has slumped by more than half because workers have been infected with COVID-19, two sources told Reuters.

(Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee, Anuron Kumar Mitra, Kannaki Deka, Manas Mishra in Bengaluru, Sudarshan Varadhan in Chennai, Rajendra Jadhav in Satara, Saurabh Sharma in Lucknow and Jatindra Dash in Bhubaneswar; Writing by Lincoln Feast and Alasdair Pal; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Kevin Liffey)

New U.S. COVID cases fall for third week, deaths lowest since July

(Reuters) – New cases of COVID-19 in the United States fell for a third week in a row, dropping 15% last week to 347,000, the lowest weekly total since October, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.

Nearly a third of the country’s population has been fully vaccinated as of Sunday, and 44% has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Michigan again led the states in new cases per capita, though new infections fell 26% last week compared with the previous seven days, the Reuters analysis showed. New cases also fell in Colorado and Minnesota, the states with the next highest rates of infection based on population.

Health officials have warned that more contagious variants of the coronavirus are still circulating, such as the B.1.1.7 variant first detected in the United Kingdom and partly responsible for the surge in Michigan.

In Oregon, where the B.1.1.7 variant is now the dominant strain, the governor last week placed nearly half the state’s counties in the extreme risk category for COVID-19, banning indoor dining and restricting capacity at other businesses.

Oregon reported a 1.2% rise in new cases last week to about 5,600, double the weekly cases seen in early April.

Nationally, deaths from COVID-19 fell 3% to 4,819 in the week ended May 2, the fewest deaths in a week since July.

The average number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals fell 8%, the first weekly decrease after rising or holding steady for four weeks.

Vaccinations fell for a second week in a row, dropping 12% after falling 14% in the previous week.

(Graphic by Chris Canipe, writing by Lisa Shumaker, editing by Tiffany Wu)

Exclusive: India’s oxygen crisis to ease by mid-May, output to jump 25% – executive

By Shivani Singh and Devjyot Ghoshal

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India’s severe medical oxygen supply crisis is expected to ease by mid-May, a top industry executive told Reuters, with output rising by 25% and transport infrastructure ready to cope with a surge in demand caused by a dramatic rise in coronavirus cases.

Dozens of hospitals in cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai have run short of the gas this month, sending relatives of patients scrambling for oxygen cylinders, sometimes in vain.

Medical oxygen consumption in India has shot up more than eight-fold from usual levels to about 7,200 tonnes per day this month, said Moloy Banerjee of Linde Plc, the country’s biggest producer.

“This is what is causing the crisis because no one was prepared for it, particularly the steep curve up,” Banerjee, who heads the company’s South Asia gas business, told Reuters on Thursday.

Linde – whose two affiliates in the country are Linde India and Praxair India – and other suppliers are ramping up production to a total of more than 9,000 tonnes per day by the middle of next month, he said.

A logistics crisis impeding the speedy movement of oxygen from surplus regions in eastern India to hard-hit northern and western areas would also be resolved in the coming weeks as more distribution assets are deployed, Banerjee said.

“My expectation is that by the middle of May we will definitely have the transport infrastructure in place that allows us to service this demand across the country,” he said.

Banerjee said India was importing around 100 cryogenic containers to transport large quantities of liquid medical oxygen, with Linde providing 60 of those. Some are being flown in by Indian Air Force aircraft.

Many of these containers will be placed on dedicated trains that would cut across the country, each carrying between 80-160 tonnes of liquid oxygen and delivering to multiple cities.

The company is also looking to double the number of oxygen cylinders in its distribution network to at least 10,000, which would improve supply to rural areas with weak infrastructure.

“We are trying to create a hub-and-spoke type of system so that we make a lot of liquid oxygen available at the local area, from where the local dealers can pick it up,” Banerjee said.

India’s total COVID-19 cases passed 18 million on Thursday after another world record number of daily infections.

(Reporting by Shivani Singh and Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by Krishna N. Das and Giles Elgood)

India infections top 18 million as gravediggers work round the clock

By Alasdair Pal and Francis Mascarenhas

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI (Reuters) -India’s total COVID-19 cases passed 18 million on Thursday after another world record number of daily infections, as gravediggers worked around the clock to bury victims and hundreds more were cremated in makeshift pyres in parks and parking lots.

India reported 379,257 new infections and 3,645 new deaths on Thursday, health ministry data showed, the highest number of fatalities in a single day since the start of the pandemic.

The world’s second most populous nation is in deep crisis, with hospitals and morgues overwhelmed.

Mumbai gravedigger Sayyed Munir Kamruddin, 52, said he and his colleagues were working non-stop to bury victims.

“I’m not scared of COVID, I’ve worked with courage. It’s all about courage, not about fear,” he said. “This is our only job. Getting the body, removing it from the ambulance, and then burying it.”

Each day, thousands of Indians search frantically for hospital beds and life-saving oxygen for sick relatives, using social media apps and personal contacts. Hospital beds that become available, especially in intensive care units (ICUs), are snapped up in minutes.

“The ferocity of the second wave took everyone by surprise,” K. Vijay Raghavan, principal scientific adviser to the government, was quoted as saying in the Indian Express newspaper.

“While we were all aware of second waves in other countries, we had vaccines at hand, and no indications from modelling exercises suggested the scale of the surge.”

India’s military has begun moving key supplies, such as oxygen, across the nation and will open its healthcare facilities to civilians.

Hotels and railway coaches have been converted into critical care facilities to make up for the shortage of hospital beds.

India’s best hope is to vaccinate its vast population, experts say, and on Wednesday it opened registration for all above the age of 18 to receive shots from Saturday.

But although it is the world’s biggest producer of vaccines, India does not have the stocks for the estimated 800 million now eligible.

Many who tried to sign up for vaccination said they failed, complaining on social media of being unable to get a slot or even to simply get on the website, as it repeatedly crashed.

“Statistics indicate that far from crashing or performing slowly, the system is performing without any glitches,” the government said on Wednesday.

More than 8 million people had registered, it said, but it was not immediately clear how many had got slots.

A local official in Mumbai said the city had paused its vaccination drive for three days as supplies were running short, while officials said the worst-hit state of Maharashtra was likely to extend strict coronavirus curbs by another two weeks.

DEATHS LIKELY UNDER-REPORTED

Only about 9% of India’s population of about 1.4 billion has received a dose since the vaccination campaign began in January.

However, while the second wave overwhelms the health system, the official death rate is below that of Brazil and the United States.

India has reported 147.2 deaths per million, the Reuters global COVID-19 tracker shows, while Brazil and the United States reported figures of 1,800 and 1,700 respectively.

However, medical experts believe India’s true COVID-19 numbers may be five to 10 times greater than the official tally.

At Delhi’s Holy Family Hospital, patients arrived in ambulances and private vehicles, some gasping for air as their oxygen cylinders ran out. In the ICU, patients lay on trolleys between beds.

“Someone that should be in the ICU is being treated in the wards,” Dr. Sumit Ray, head of the unit, told Reuters.

“We are completely full. The doctors and nurses are demoralized, they know they can do better, but they just don’t have the time. No one takes a break.”

The U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory on Wednesday against travel to India because of the pandemic and advised its citizens to leave the country.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticized for allowing massive political rallies and religious festivals which have been super-spreader events in recent weeks.

“The people of this country are entitled to a full and honest account of what led more than a billion people into a catastrophe,” Vikram Patel, a global health expert at Harvard Medical School, said in the Hindu newspaper.

AID STARTS ARRIVING

India expects close to 550 oxygen generating facilities from around the world as medical aid starts pouring in, Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said on Thursday.

Two planes from Russia, carrying 20 oxygen concentrators, 75 ventilators, 150 bedside monitors, and 22 tonnes of medicine, have arrived in Delhi.

The United States is sending supplies worth more than $100 million, including 1,000 oxygen cylinders, 15 million N95 masks and 1 million rapid diagnostic tests, the White House said on Wednesday.

The supplies will begin arriving on Thursday, it added.

The United States also has redirected its own order of AstraZeneca manufacturing supplies to India, to allow it to make more than 20 million doses, the White House said.

India will receive a first batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine on May 1. Russia’s RDIF sovereign wealth fund, which markets Sputnik V globally, has signed deals with five Indian manufacturers for more than 850 million vaccine doses a year.

Bangladesh said it would send about 10,000 vials of anti-viral medicines, 30,000 PPE kits, and several thousand mineral and vitamin tablets.

Germany will send 120 ventilators on Saturday, and a mobile oxygen production facility next week, its defense ministry said.

(Additional reporting by Shilpa Jamkhandikar in Mumbai, Anuron Kumar Mitra in Bengaluru, Neha Arora and Tanvi Mehta in Delhi, Ruma Paul in Dhaka, Subrata Nag Choudhury in Kolkata; Writing by Michael Perry and Giles Elgood; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Gareth Jones)