Tag Archives: India

India orders unapproved COVID shots as it reels from devastating second wave

By Neha Arora and Sethuraman N R

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -India signed its first order for an unapproved COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday, a day after it faced criticism from the Supreme Court over its bungled vaccine rollout that has left millions of people vulnerable after almost 338,000 deaths.

So far, only about 4.7% of the 950 million adult population have been given two vaccine doses as the world’s second-most populous country reels from a devastating second wave of infections that killed around 170,000 people in April and May alone.

The government will buy 300 million vaccine doses from local firm Biological-E and has put down an advance of $205.6 million, the health ministry said, even though the vaccine is still going through Phase III clinical trials.

“The arrangement with Biological-E is part of the wider endeavor of Government of India to encourage indigenous vaccine manufacturers by providing them support in research & development and also financial support,” the ministry said in a statement.

India has been inoculating its people with AstraZeneca shots produced at the Serum Institute of India, Covaxin made by local firm Bharat Biotech and is set to commercially launch Russia’s Sputnik V in mid-June.

But supplies are running short after the government opened vaccinations to all adults last month. Some vaccination centers have had to close down, prompting criticism from the Supreme Court about a lack of planning.

While the federal government gave free vaccines to the elderly and frontline workers, it left state governments and private hospitals to administer doses to people in the 18 to 45 age group at a price.

“The policy of the central government of conducting free vaccination themselves for groups under the first two phases, and replacing it with paid vaccination … is, prima facie, arbitrary and irrational,” the Supreme Court said.

The government said this week it could have as many as 10 million doses each day in July and August, up from just under three million now.

Pressure is set to mount further on the government to speed up vaccinations, as several states prepare to ease lockdowns even amid high numbers of daily infections and deaths.

The western state of Maharashtra, home to financial hub Mumbai, is set to lift most restrictions across half its districts from Friday, based on the availability of oxygen beds and infection rates, officials said.

India on Thursday announced 134,154 new infections over the past 24 hours, down more than 65% from a peak of 414,188 reported on May 7. The official recorded case load since the start of the pandemic now stands at 28.4 million, the second-highest in the world after the United States.

India added 2,887 deaths overnight, pushing the overall toll to 337,989, the world’s third-highest toll after the United States and Brazil.

New Delhi’s high court said some federal officials should be charged with manslaughter for the poor vaccine rollout.

“Who are they referring to, you think? This effectively concludes the debate on that subject,” Sanjay Jha, a former Congress official and political commentator, said on Twitter.

“This government has failed. And failed its people miserably.”

($1 = 72.9500 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Neha Arora in New Delhi, Nallur Sethuraman in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Rajendra Jadhav, Bhargav Acharya, Rama Venkat and Tanvi Mehta; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani, Kim Coghill and Nick Macfie)

Australia’s Victoria extends Melbourne COVID-19 lockdown for 2nd week

By Renju Jose

SYDNEY (Reuters) -The Australian state of Victoria extended on Wednesday a snap coronavirus lockdown in its capital of Melbourne for a second week, as it scrambles to rein in a highly contagious variant first detected in India, but will ease some curbs elsewhere.

Last Thursday’s lockdown in Australia’s second most populous state was to have run until Thursday, following the detection of the first locally acquired cases in three months, but infections rose and the number of close contacts reached several thousand.

“If we let this thing run its course, it will explode,” the state’s acting Premier James Merlino told reporters in Melbourne. “This variant of concern will become uncontrollable and people will die.”

“No one…wants to repeat last winter,” he added, referring to one of the world’s strictest and longest lockdowns that the southeastern state imposed in 2020 to leash a second wave of infections.

More than 800 people died in that outbreak, accounting for about 90% of Australia’s total deaths since the pandemic began.

Snap lockdowns, regional border curbs and tough social distancing rules have largely helped Australia suppress prior outbreaks and keep its COVID-19 figures relatively low, at just over 30,100 cases and 910 deaths.

Though Victoria’s daily cases have been in the single digits since the lockdown was imposed, officials fear even minimal contact could help spread the variant involved in the latest outbreak.

Six new locally acquired cases were reported on Wednesday, versus nine a day earlier, taking to 60 the tally of infections in the latest outbreak.

Health authorities have said the variant could take just one day to pass from person to person, versus the five or six days of contact required for transmission of earlier variants.

For now, Melbourne’s five million residents face a second week of being allowed to leave home only for essential work, healthcare, grocery shopping, exercise or a vaccination.

But this restriction is likely to be relaxed for people elsewhere in the state, depending on any local transmission in the next 24 hours, while other measures, such as mandatory masks, will stay.

The latest outbreak has been traced back to a traveler who returned from overseas, authorities have said. The individual left hotel quarantine in the state of South Australia after testing negative, but subsequently tested positive in Melbourne.

Casino operator Crown Resorts Ltd, Victoria’s biggest single-site employer with 11,500 staff, had said at the start of the lockdown it would stand down staff but pay them wages for rostered hours.

After Wednesday’s extension, Crown has said it would make only a “one-off discretionary” payment, however.

Since the early days of the pandemic, Australian employers have relied on federal subsidies to pay staff stood down during lockdowns, but the government ended that scheme in March.

Merlino, the acting Victoria premier, called for the federal government to reinstate the subsidies in light of the lockdown. Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the government was open to new support measures but would talk to officials in Victoria before committing to specifics.

(Reporting by Renju Jose with additional reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell and Clarence Fernandez)

Cyclone leaves more than 150,000 people homeless in eastern India

By Subrata Nagchoudhury and Jatindra Dash

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) – More than 150,000 people were left homeless in the aftermath of a cyclone that unleashed storm surges in eastern India and Bangladesh, officials said on Thursday, with heavy rains hampering relief work in some low-lying coastal areas.

At least five people were killed in the two countries after Cyclone Yaas moved inland from the Bay of Bengal on Wednesday, packing gusts of up to 140 kph (87 mph) and whipping up tidal surges in India’s West Bengal state and neighboring Bangladesh.

Indian officials said the storm had weakened into a depression after hitting the coast but heavy rain poured down in parts of West Bengal, where there was fresh inundation of sea water along some coastal villages on Thursday.

“Restoration work will be difficult unless the weather improves,” West Bengal state minister Bankim Hazra told Reuters.

In West Bengal’s Sundarbans delta, which stretches into Bangladesh, at least 25,000 homes, many of them traditional mud houses, had been destroyed, leaving 150,000 people homeless, Hazra said, citing preliminary estimates.

The storm, the second to hit India in a week, arrived as the country grapples with a deadly second wave of coronavirus infections that has stretched the healthcare system to breaking point.

Some 500,000 people were sheltered in relief camps in West Bengal and officials said they had taken steps to reduce the risk of a potential spread of the virus.

“Flood shelters have quarantine rooms for those showing symptoms of COVID-19 like fever, sore throat, body ache,” Dr. Indranil Bargi, a medical officer in Gosaba area, told Reuters.

People are being tested for coronavirus using the rapid antigen test and anyone who tests positive would be shifted to safe homes set up in government offices and schools, he said.

Authorities in Bangladesh reported flooding of villages due to torrential rains and tidal surges. Three people were dead, two by drowning and a third who was hit by a tree, an official at the Disaster Management Agency said.

“I have never seen a tidal surge rising to this level. It flooded many villages and washed away houses. Many people are marooned,” said Humayum Kabir, an official in the coastal district of Khulna.

Elsewhere on the sub-continent, Nepal was bracing for floods in its plains and landslides in the hills as heavy rains have lashed the Himalayan country since Wednesday and were forecast to last till Saturday.

(Reporting by Jatindra Dash in Bhubaneshwar, Subrata Nagchoudhury in Kolkata, Ruma Paul in Dhaka and Gopal Sharma in Kathmandu; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani and Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore/Mark Heinrich)

France imposes quarantine on UK visitors ahead of summer tourist season

By Matthieu Protard

PARIS (Reuters) -France on Wednesday declared a mandatory quarantine period for people coming from Britain, due to the increasing prevalence there of a highly contagious coronavirus variant first detected in India.

France follows Austria, which said on Tuesday it was banning direct flights and tourist visits from Britain, and Germany, which said on Friday that anyone entering from the UK would have to quarantine for two weeks on arrival.

“There is a new situation with the progression of the so-called Indian variant in the United Kingdom,” said government spokesman Gabriel Attal. “(France) will set up compulsory isolation for people coming from the United Kingdom.”

The isolation will need to last seven days, Clement Beaune, France’s junior minister for European Affairs, said on Twitter, adding visitors would also need to present a COVID-19 test carried out less than 48 hours before departure.

The measures are expected to come into force on Monday.

Coronavirus infections in Britain have been rising again, but the overall incidence is still low in a country with one of the world’s fastest vaccine rollouts. The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients fell last week to its lowest level since September.

Clusters of the B.1.617 Indian variant have grown quickly, however, to 3,424 as of last Thursday, up by 2,111 from similar numbers the previous week. The Indian variant has been reported in at least 17 countries.

The French government’s announcement will be a blow to parts of the beleaguered tourism industry, which is desperate for a return to normal business ahead of the peak summer season.

“It’s reasonable in terms of saving the French summer but will be very punishing for those regions which depend on British holidaymakers,” said Ge Kusters, owner of Le Paradis campsite in the Dordogne area and president of the regional campsite union.

“More financial support is going to have to follow.”

British tourists had been due to be allowed to visit France without restrictions from June 9 if they carried a certificate of vaccination against COVID-19 or a negative COVID-19 PCR test.

Some 13 million Britons visited France every year before the coronavirus crisis began in early 2020, more than any other nationality, according to official data.

(Reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten and Matthieu Protard; Additional reporting by Matthias Blamont; Editing by Dominique Vidalon, Mark Heinrich and Peter Cooney)

Villages in eastern India inundated as cyclone Yaas moves inland

By Jatindra Dash and Subrata NagChoudhury

BHUBANESWAR, India (Reuters) -Storm surges inundated dozens of villages in eastern India on Wednesday after a powerful cyclone moved inland from the Bay of Bengal, damaging thousands of mud homes in two coastal states and killing at least one person, officials said.

Cyclone Yaas was packing gusts of up to 140 kph (87 mph) as it made landfall, days after another storm tore up the western coast, triggering mass evacuations and piling pressure on authorities battling a deadly second wave of the coronavirus.

Authorities said more than a million inhabitants had been moved out of the storm’s path and the busiest regional airport, in the city of Kolkata, had been shut until Wednesday evening.

In the eastern state of Odisha’s Balasore district, where the storm struck early on Wednesday, authorities said 46 villages along the coast had been flooded.

“Most of the villages were empty. The total population would be around 10,000,” K. Sudarshan Chakravarthy, the district’s top government official, told Reuters.

In neighboring West Bengal state, rising waters breached river embankments in more than 100 locations and 20,000 traditional mud homes had been damaged, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee told reporters.

“A large number of villages are under water,” she said.

At least one person had died in the state after a house collapsed, Banerjee said.

“I have not seen anything like this before,” said another state minister, Bankim Hazra, after seawater gushed into low-lying areas of Sagar island in the Bay of Bengal and the tourist town of Digha, where a police station was flooded.

“Successive high tides battered the coastline,” he added. “It is inundation all around and villages are cut off.”

Cyclones in the Bay of Bengal are common at this time of year, and often roar ashore, bringing death and destruction to the coastal areas of both India and neighboring Bangladesh.

The devastating wave of virus infections complicated storm preparations. Odisha officials said they had suspended testing, vaccination and a door-to-door health survey in the three districts in the storm’s path.

Weather officials in Bangladesh said the storm was likely to swamp low-lying areas of 14 coastal districts, bringing tides three to four feet (0.91-1.22 meters) higher than normal. They advised fishing boats and trawlers to stay in shelter.

(Additional reporting by Ruma Paul in Dhaka; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani and Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Mark Heinrich)

At least two people killed as cyclone bears down on India’s east coast

By Subrata Nagchoudhury and Jatindra Dash

BHUBANESWAR, India (Reuters) – A tornado ripped through eastern India on Tuesday, killing at least two people and damaging dozens of homes as a powerful cyclone neared the coast, officials said, while authorities tried to move over a million people to safety from low-lying areas.

Cyclone Yaas was powering across the Bay of Bengal and would batter the eastern states of Odisha and West Bengal, and also Bangladesh, on Wednesday, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.

“It is likely to cause large-scale damage,” IMD chief Mrutyunjay Mohapatra told Reuters by telephone.

A freak tornado that some experts said was linked to the incoming storm snapped electricity lines, which electrocuted two people, and damaged around 45 houses in West Bengal’s Hooghly district, a government official said.

In all, the state had already moved around 900,000 people in several coastal districts to storm shelters, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee told reporters.

But neighboring Odisha state appeared likely to face the brunt of Cyclone Yaas – the second cyclone to hit the country in a week – where officials also began moving people in cars and boats into storm shelters and other sturdy structures.

Pregnant women and children were sent to government hospitals, as fishermen shifted boats to safety inland.

In Odisha’s Balasore district, close to where the cyclone is expected to make landfall, volunteers broadcast alerts over megaphones, urging people to move.

“Evacuation is always a challenge. In general, there is a reluctance … this time we have COVID,” said Vishal Kumar Dev, an official overseeing relief efforts in Balasore.

“Often people say, ‘We’ll go only when the rain increases.’ We’re convincing them.”

Cyclones in the Bay of Bengal are common at this time of year, and often roar ashore, causing deaths and destruction in coastal areas of both India and Bangladesh.

Last week, Cyclone Tauktae – the most powerful cyclone to hit India’s west cost in more than two decades – killed more than 150 people.

A devastating second wave of coronavirus infections complicated storm preparations. Officials in Odisha said they were conducting antigen tests and temperature checks, and isolating people with COVID-19 symptoms.

(Reporting by Jatindra Das in BHUBANESWAR and Subrata Nagachoudhury in KOLKATA; Writing by Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by Robert Birsel and Howard Goller)

COVID fight could return ‘to square one’: experts sound vaccines alarm

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – India’s export ban on COVID-19 shots risks dragging the battle against the pandemic “back to square one” unless wealthy nations step in to plug a gaping hole in the COVAX global vaccine-sharing scheme, health specialists said on Thursday.

COVAX, which is critical for poorer countries, relies on AstraZeneca shots made by the Serum Institute of India, the world’s biggest maker of vaccines. It was already around 100 million doses short of where it had planned to be when India halted exports a month ago amid a surge in infections there.

Rich countries with plentiful COVID-19 vaccine stocks must now share them immediately, at scale, the global experts said, otherwise the pandemic could be prolonged as the world struggles to contain a virus that is continuing to spread and mutate.

“It is a huge concern,” said Anna Marriott, health policy manager at the global charity Oxfam. She and others said it was imperative that wealthy countries and regions make good on their rhetoric and share excess vaccines now.

“The current approach that relies on a few pharma monopolies and a trickle of charity through COVAX is failing – and people are dying as a result.”

Reuters reported on Tuesday that India is extending its ban, meaning it is now unlikely to resume major exports before October.

Will Hall, global policy manager for the Wellcome global health trust, said COVAX’s heavy reliance on the Serum Institute left it vulnerable. India’s extension of its export ban made it even more crucial for rich countries to share doses via the scheme, he said, “not in six months’ time, not in a month’s time, but now”.

“We’re not going to beat this virus unless we think and act globally,” he added. “We all should be concerned about this – the more the virus continues to spread, the greater the risk of it mutating to a stage where our vaccines and treatments no longer work. If that happens we’re back to square one.”

A highly transmissible new variant of the novel coronavirus first identified in India has spread to several countries around the world.

‘VERY FEW OPTIONS’

COVAX aims to get vaccines to at least 20% of the populations of the more-than 90 low and middle-income countries signed up to receive the shots as donations. It has so far distributed about 65 million doses of mainly the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, many of them to Africa.

A spokeswoman for the GAVI vaccines alliance, which co-leads COVAX, said the facility was working hard to make up supplies.

“We’re trying to find different ways of making sure that those countries that have received the first dose are able to also receive a second dose and that vaccinations can continue,” she told Reuters. “What we need right now, to meet the immediate needs, is dose sharing.”

The United States said on Wednesday it would share a total of 20 million doses of Pfizer’s, Moderna’s and Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines by the end of June, donating a significant amount via COVAX, on top of 60 million AstraZeneca shots it had already planned to give to other countries.

EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said this week that the bloc was working to significantly ramp up vaccine donations through COVAX in the second half of 2021. Vaccine sharing announced by EU member states has so far amounted to 11.1 million vaccines, he said, of which 9 million are being shared via COVAX.

Britain, meanwhile, will have enough surplus doses to fully vaccinate at least 50 million people in poorer countries once every adult at home has been fully vaccinated, according to analysis by UNICEF’s UK office last week.

The GAVI spokeswoman said COVAX’S reliance on the Serum Institute was based, largely, on its vast production capacity, ability to deliver at low cost and on assurances that it would be able to produce the millions of doses needed at speed.

“It always was COVAX’s plan to grow and diversify its portfolio to 10-12 vaccines but at the start of the year when approved vaccines were only slowly coming online, we had very few options available to us,” she said.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio in Brussels and Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt; Editing by Pravin Char)

Braving COVID risks, Indian volunteers tend to the sick and the dead

By Kannaki Deka and Chandini Monnappa

BENGALURU (Reuters) – Every day after he wraps up the online classes he teaches at a Bengaluru college, Akshay Mandlik puts on his mask, gloves and overalls and heads out to help bury the COVID dead.

The 37-year-old professor of social work is one of many citizen volunteers across India who have stepped up to help families affected by the country’s devastating second wave, often risking their own personal safety.

Mandlik helps grieving relatives find burial spaces, carry the dead and even dig graves when no gravedigger is available.

“I took some time to think about getting involved as I am not vaccinated, but the need of the hour was greater than my own fear,” Mandlik said.

India, the world’s biggest vaccine producer, has fully vaccinated just over 40.9 million people, or only 3.3% of its 1.35 billion population as of Wednesday.

Volunteers say they have been moved to act by desperate pleas for help on social media and in their local communities.

Brothers Murthaza Junaid and Muteeb Zoheb, both well-known motorcycle racers and entrepreneurs, are now volunteering as ambulance drivers in Bengaluru, responding to hundreds of calls every week.

Zoheb, 33, said he and his brother decided to volunteer a month ago after hearing accounts of families being overcharged by professional ambulance services.

With the epicenter of India’s second wave constantly shifting, Bengaluru’s COVID-19 death toll passed 10,000 on Tuesday and its daily number of new infections has overtaken those of Mumbai and New Delhi. More than a third of Bengaluru’s fatalities have occurred so far in May.

Informal groups of volunteers have sprung up, with the likes of IT professionals, investment bankers, estate agents and students working together to locate critical care beds, stocks of Remdesivir, oxygen concentrators or ambulances.

Azmat Mohammed, 44, said he had taken a sabbatical from his job in IT to help full-time, while law student Akshaya 22, said she was balancing classes with her COVID volunteering.

“I believe that if we do good, you get back good,” said Akshaya, who prefers to use only her first name.

“I attend classes and go to the cemetery for burials. I also spend time collaborating with other people to help with ambulances. It is a lot of multi-tasking.”

With the second wave spreading beyond the large cities, similar groups have formed in smaller towns and cities as well.

In Surat in the western state of Gujarat, volunteers at the Khan Trust and Ekta Foundation are working to cremate COVID-infected bodies in the region.

During a wave of deadly Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002, Surat experienced some of the worst violence, but the pandemic has diluted some of the residual hostility between communities, volunteers say.

Sahil Sheikh, in his 20s, said he and his friends have conducted the final rites for nearly 800 people in the past year, of all religions.

(Reporting by Kannaki Deka, Chandini Monnappa, Sachin Ravikumar and Aishwarya Nair in Bengaluru, Rupam Jain in Goa; writing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee; editing by Estelle Shirbon)

India’s halt to vaccine exports ‘very problematic’ for Africa

By Giulia Paravicini

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – An extended halt to exports of COVID-19 vaccines from India, where authorities are battling a wave of domestic infections, risks derailing vaccination efforts already underway in Africa, one of the continent’s top health officials said on Tuesday.

India stopped vaccine exports a month ago and, according to a Reuters report earlier on Tuesday, is now unlikely to resume major exports before October, dealing a major setback to the global COVAX initiative on which many poor countries rely.

Africa has lagged far behind other regions due to supply issues and meagre financial resources but had planned to vaccinate 30-35% of its population by the end of the year and 60% within the next two to three years.

“This is very problematic as it means unpredictability of our vaccination programs and a serious risk of not achieving our stated target… on time,” the director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, wrote to Reuters.

Those targets primarily relied on supplies from the global COVAX vaccine-sharing facility, which has depended heavily on AstraZeneca shots produced by the Serum Institute of India (SII).

“Given India’s huge challenges, it will be impossible to expect anything soon,” Nkengasong said.

There have been at least 4,742,000 reported infections and 126,000 reported deaths caused by the novel coronavirus in Africa so far, according to a Reuters tally.

And while the pandemic’s impact has been less acute than in the United States, Europe and now India, Africa’s largely unvaccinated population of over 1 billion remains vulnerable, experts say.

COVAX had already begun distributing millions of doses of the two-shot AstraZeneca vaccine to countries across Africa. But those initial shipments have now been largely exhausted, with around 80% having been administered as a first dose, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Most countries using COVAX will now surpass the 12-week maximum interval recommended between the first and second dose of AstraZeneca unless 20 million doses are delivered by the end of June and another 5 million in July, the WHO said.

“The supply gap could be closed if countries with adequate supplies set aside a percentage of vaccines for COVAX,” said Richard Mihigo, coordinator of the WHO’s Immunization and Vaccines Development Program in Africa.

A deal negotiated with Johnson & Johnson by the African Union should supply Africa with 400 million vaccine doses beginning in the third quarter of this year.

Several countries’ health officials told Reuters they had yet to receive updated information on expected arrival dates for COVAX shots. Some are now weighing their options.

Ethiopia, for example, has received just 2.2 million of the 7.6 million AstraZeneca shots it was due to get through COVAX by the end of April.

“We were expecting some delays, but not to this scale. As a country we must search other options,” Muluken Yohannes, a senior adviser to Ethiopia’s health ministry, told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Omar Mohammed in Nairobi, Christophe Van Der Perre in Dakar and Camillus Eboh and Felix Onuah in Abuja; Editing by Joe Bavier and Alexandra Hudson)

Under a tree, one Indian village cares for its COVID-19 sick

By Danish Siddiqui

MEWLA GOPALGARH, India (Reuters) – In a village in northern India engulfed by COVID-19, the sick lie on cots under a tree, glucose drips hanging from a branch. Cows graze all around, while syringes and empty medicine packets are strewn on the ground.

There is no doctor or health facility in Mewla Gopalgarh in India’s most-populous state of Uttar Pradesh, a 90-minute drive from the national capital Delhi. There is a government hospital nearby but it has no available beds and the villagers say they cannot afford private clinics.

Instead, village practitioners of alternative medicine have set up an open-air clinic where they distribute glucose and other remedies to patients with symptoms of COVID-19.

Some believe lying under the neem tree, known for its medicinal properties, will raise their oxygen levels. There is no scientific basis for this belief or for some of the other remedies being offered.

“When people become breathless, they have to go under trees to raise their oxygen levels,” said Sanjay Singh, whose 74-year-old father died a few days ago after developing a fever. Singh said his father was not tested and died in two days.

“People are dying and there is nobody to look after us,” he said.

India’s devastating second wave of infections, which has brought even hospitals in big cities such as Delhi to breaking point, is ripping through the country’s vast rural hinterland where healthcare is threadbare.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is facing criticism for failing to prepare for the second wave, said in a speech last week that the pandemic was spreading fast in the villages and urged people not to ignore the symptoms.

“Get the test done, isolate yourself and start medication on time,” he said.

But in this village, people are making do as best they can. One woman had borrowed an oxygen cylinder from a neighbor whose condition had improved slightly, her family said.

“Truth is, there has been no COVID-19 testing. We have tried but they told us they don’t have enough staff,” said 48-year old Yogesh Talan, a former headman of the village.

(Reporting by Danish Siddiqui; Writing by Manas Mishra; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani, Karishma Singh and Estelle Shirbon)