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 Boosted by highly infectious variants, the second wave erupted in
February to inundate hospitals and medical staff, as well as
crematoriums and mortuaries. Experts are still unable to say with
certainty when the figures will peak.
Deaths swelled by a record 4,205 while infections rose 348,421 in
the 24 hours to Wednesday, carrying the tally past 23 million,
health ministry data showed. Experts believe the actual numbers
could be five to 10 times higher, however.
Funeral pyres have blazed in city parking lots, and scores of bodies
have washed up on the banks of the holy river Ganges, having been
immersed by relatives whose villages were stripped bare of the wood
needed for cremations.
Lacking beds, drugs and medical oxygen, many hospitals in the
world's second-most populous nation have been forced to turn away
droves of sufferers, while tales of desperate relatives searching
for someone to treat dying loved ones have become sickeningly
commonplace.
Many victims die without a doctor on hand to issue a death
certificate, and even when a doctor is available, COVID-19 is not
specified as the cause of death unless the deceased was tested for
the disease, which few have been.
Although the infection curve may be showing early signs of
flattening, new cases are likely to fall off slowly, according to
virologist Shahid Jameel.
"We seem to be plateauing around 400,000 cases a day," the Indian
Express newspaper quoted him as saying. "It is still too early to
say whether we have reached the peak."
India, with a population of 1.4 billion, 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.
Dr. Balram Bhargava, head of the main Indian health agency
responding to the coronavirus, has said districts where over 10% of
those tested have the disease should remain locked down for another
six to eight weeks to control the spread.
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 Currently, three-quarters of
India's 718 districts have what is known as a
test-positivity rate above 10%, including major
cities like New Delhi, Mumbai and the tech hub
of Bengaluru.
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RURAL SPREAD
Daily infections are shooting up in the
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, Tanvi Mehta in New Delhi
and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Raju
Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore
and Clarence Fernandez/Mark Heinrich)
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