NEW DELHI-India crossed another grim milestone on Monday. The surge in the number of infectious catastrophic outbreaks in big cities seems to be easing, but it is flooding poor rural areas and more than 300,000 people died from the coronavirus.
This milestone event recorded by the Ministry of Health of India is due to the slowing of vaccine delivery, which has harmed the country’s fight against the pandemic, forcing many people to miss vaccine injections. The rare but deadly fungal infection affecting COVID-19 patients is worrying doctors. .
India’s death toll is the third highest death toll in the world, accounting for 8.6% of the nearly 34.7 million coronavirus deaths worldwide, although the true number is believed to be much higher.
The Ministry of Health reported on Monday that 4,454 people died of new lives in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths in India to 303,720. It also reported 222,315 new infections, bringing the total to nearly 27 million. It is almost certain that both are underestimated.
From remote Himalayan villages in the north, to the vast wet central plains, to the sandy beaches of the south, the epidemic spread rapidly in India and flooded India’s underfunded medical system.
In the capital of New Delhi, residents died at home without oxygen because the hospital ran out of limited supplies. In Mumbai, COVID-19 patients died in crowded hospital corridors. In rural areas, people have fever and difficulty breathing even before being tested for coronavirus.
Although there have been signs of improvement in major cities in recent days, India has not yet completely eliminated the virus. It seems to have had painful consequences in the vast rural areas of the country, where most people live and medical care is limited.
Hundreds of dead bodies on both sides of the Ganges River in Uttar Pradesh have been washed away in recent weeks. Many others have been found buried in shallow graves on its sandy embankment. This has aroused people’s concern that they are still the remains of COVID-19 victims.
India’s vaccination campaign has also recently slowed down, and many states have stated that they do not have enough vaccines to manage.
The world’s largest vaccine producer has vaccinated more than 41.6 million people, accounting for only 3.8% of its nearly 1.4 billion population.
The first known death from COVID-19 in India occurred in southern Karnataka on March 12, 2020. It took seven months to kill the first 100,000 people. In late April, the death toll reached 200,000. Only 27 days after new infections tore in dense urban and rural areas and overwhelming health care systems on the brink of collapse, 100,000 deaths were recorded.
In the past few weeks, the average daily number of deaths and cases has decreased slightly, and the government said on Sunday that it has conducted the highest number of COVID-19 tests, testing 2.1 million samples in the past 24 hours.
