The countries that failed miserably to respond properly to COVID seem to have a common thread; failed nationalistic leaders who ignore the science and claim to know better. Imagine if you will a country with an arrogant, nationalist leader who refuses to listen to science, prematurely declares victory over Covid, and is still holding massive campaign rallies, while a highly contagious variant has emerged. Let's start with today's example. ‘The system has collapsed’: India’s descent into Covid hell Many falsely believed that the country had defeated Covid. Now hospitals are running out of oxygen and bodies are stacking up in morgues https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/21/system-has-collapsed-india-descent-into-covid-hell Looking out over a sea of jostling, maskless faces gathered at a political rally in West Bengal on Saturday, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, proudly proclaimed that he had “never ever seen such huge crowds”. A mask was also noticeably absent from Modi’s face. That same day, India registered a record-breaking 234,000 new coronavirus cases and 1,341 deaths – and the numbers have kept rising since. The country has descended into a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. Almost 1.6 million cases have been registered in a week, bringing total cases to more than 15 million. In the space of just 12 days, the Covid positivity rate doubled to 17%, while in Delhi it hit 30%. Hospitals across the country have filled to capacity but this time it is predominately the young taking up the beds; in Delhi, 65% of cases are under 40 years old. While the unprecedented spread of the virus has been partly blamed on a more contagious variant that has emerged in India, Modi’s government has also been accused of failures of political leadership from the top, with lax attitudes emulated by state and local leaders from all parties and even health officials across the country, which led many to falsely believe in recent months that India had defeated Covid. “Leadership across the country did not adequately convey that this was an epidemic which had not gone away,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “Victory was declared prematurely and that ebullient mood was communicated across the country, especially by politicians who wanted to get the economy going and wanted to get back to campaigning. And that gave the virus the chance to rise again.” In West Bengal, where Modi’s government has refused to curtail the drawn-out state elections that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hoping to win, Modi and his home minister, Amit Shah, continued their public meetings and roadshows into this week even as queues of ambulances lined up outside hospitals across India. On Saturday, the same day as Modi’s rally, the state registered 7,713 new cases – the highest since the pandemic began. Three candidates running in the election have died from the virus. By Sunday, #ModiMadeDisaster began trending on Twitter. Doctors on the frontline broke down, speaking of the deluge of dying Covid patients they had been unable to treat due to a lack of beds and inadequate state and central government preparation. Dr Amit Thadhani, director of Niramaya hospital in Mumbai, which is only treating Covid patients, said he had given warnings about a virulent second wave back in February but they had gone ignored. He said now his hospital was “completely full and if a patient gets discharged, the bed is filled within minutes”. Ten days ago, the hospital ran out of oxygen, but alternative supplies were found just in time. “There are people lined up outside the hospital trying to get in and every day we are getting calls every 30 seconds from someone trying to find a bed,” said Thadhani. “Most of these calls are for patients who are critically ill and do need hospital care but there just isn’t enough capacity and so there is a lot of mortality happening. Everyone has been stretched to their limit.” Thadhani said this time round the virus was “much more aggressive and much more infectious” and was now predominately affecting young people. “Now it is people in their 20s and 30s who are coming in with very severe symptoms and there is a lot of mortality among young people,” he said. The haunting blare of ambulance sirens continued to ring out across the capital almost non-stop. Inside Lok Nayak government hospital in Delhi, the largest Covid facility in the capital, overburdened facilities and a shortage of oxygen cylinders meant there was two to a bed, while outside patients waiting for beds gasped for air on stretchers and in ambulances, while sobbing relatives stood by their sides. Some sat with oxygen cylinders they had bought themselves out of desperation. Others died waiting in the hospital car park. In Mumbai, which was the first city to bear the brunt of the second wave, Dr Jalil Parkar of Lilavati hospital said that “the whole healthcare system has collapsed and doctors are exhausted”. “There is a shortage of beds, shortage of oxygen, shortage of drugs, shortage of vaccines, shorting of testing,” said Parkar. “Even though we opened another wing for Covid, we still don’t have nearly enough beds, so we have had to put some patients in the corridors and we have turned the basement into a triage area for Covid patients. We have people waiting in ambulances and wheelchairs outside the hospital and we have to sometimes give them oxygen out there. What else can we do?” Even those in the upper echelons of power struggled to find beds for their loved ones. Vijay Singh Kumar, the national minister for transport and a BJP MP in the state of Uttar Pradesh, resorted to Twitter with the plea: “Please help us, my brother needs a bed for corona treatment. Now beds are not being arranged in Ghaziabad.” Announcing a six-day lockdown to prevent the complete collapse of the healthcare system, Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, did not mince his words. “The Covid situation in Delhi is grim,” he said on Monday. Over 99% of ICU beds in the capital were occupied that day and by Tuesday, several of Delhi’s top hospitals, all with hundreds of Covid patients, had declared oxygen emergencies, warning they had just hours of supplies left. States such a Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh stand accused of covering up the true death toll from coronavirus, with the numbers of bodies stacking up in hospital morgues far outnumbering official fatality figures. Among the worst-hit cities in Uttar Pradesh was Lucknow, where 22-year-old Deepti Mistri – a mother of one who had no pre-existing health conditions – was among the city’s dead, after falling ill with Covid on 14 April. Her uncle Saroj Kumar Pandey, an ambulance driver who raised her from childhood, said he had desperately tried to find her a hospital bed when, two days later, her oxygen level began to drop dangerously to below 50% but could not find anywhere that had room. “I realised Deepti needed oxygen immediately so I arranged for a cylinder for her myself,” he said. “I put her into the back of a relative’s car with the oxygen while I went around to a dozen private and government hospitals trying to find her a bed and a ventilator. But nowhere would take her.” Eventually, late at night on 16 April Pandey found her a bed in a small six-bed private clinic in Lucknow. It was not a Covid hospital but they agreed to take her for a single night to give her oxygen while Pandey continued his search for a hospital bed. “We kept looking all night but nowhere had a bed or ventilator for her,” he said. “In the morning the clinic discharged her at 5am, so we had no choice but to bring her home. Deepti died a few hours later because she did not have oxygen and hospital care. She should be alive today.” Twitter and Facebook have become a devastating catalogue of hundreds of thousands of urgent pleas for help finding hospital beds, oxygen, plasma and remdesivir, the drug experimentally used to help treat Covid patients, which remains in short supply in hospitals across the country. The dead, meanwhile, have continued to overload crematoriums and graveyards in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Delhi faster than they could be burned, and families waited days to cremate their loved ones. On Sunday, Delhi’s largest cremation facility, Nigambodh Ghat, ran out of space, despite doubling its funeral pyres to more than 60. State governments in Delhi and Mumbai have been scrambling to rebuild the temporary Covid facilities they had dismantled months earlier, while the central government announced an amping up of the vaccination programme which would mean anyone over the age of 18 will be eligible from 1 May, though a shortage of supplies remains an issue. An edict from the government ruled that all oxygen meant for industrial use would now be diverted to hospitals to meet the unprecedented demand, and Indian railways said they were all set to operate special trains specially designed to carry liquid oxygen and oxygen cylinders, dubbed the “Oxygen Express”. Thousands of Covid beds have also been arranged in train carriages. Still, many fear that it is too little, too late. “The seriousness of the situation should have been realised months ago but instead governments were in denial and gave out messages that the virus was not that dangerous any more,” said Thadhani. “I’m worried that we still have not seen the worst.”
There are similarities. The rural regions in India which strongly supported Modi have the highest rates of undercounted COVID deaths. The rural counties in Florida which strongly supported DeSantis have the highest rates of undercounted COVID deaths.
There are multiple studies showing the under-counting of deaths attributed to COVID -- both in India and Florida.
Relatives of COVID-19 patients in India stole oxygen cylinders from a hospital twice in 2 days in a desperate bid to save family members as the country's catastrophic second wave worsens https://www.insider.com/india-covid-second-wave-oxygen-shortage-2021-4 Relatives of COVID-19 patients stole oxygen cylinders from an Indian hospital twice in two days, per local news reports. India is facing a severe oxygen shortage as it battles a devastating second coronavirus wave. The country reported a record 2,023 COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, but the actual death toll could be much higher. (More at above url)
‘World’s worst outbreak’: what India’s papers say as coronavirus crisis toll mounts Newspapers warn that the situation shows no sign of improving, and calls on warring politicians to cooperate to beat the virus https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-papers-say-as-coronavirus-crisis-toll-mounts
India beats the US record for most new coronavirus infections in one day. India posts world record COVID cases with oxygen running out https://www.reuters.com/world/india...-coronavirus-cases-anywhere-world-2021-04-22/ India recorded the world’s highest daily tally of 314,835 COVID-19 infections on Thursday as a second wave of the pandemic raised new fears about the ability of crumbling health services to cope. Health officials across northern and western India, including the capital, New Delhi, said they were in crisis,with most hospitals full and running out of oxygen. Some doctors advised patients to stay at home, while a crematorium in the eastern city of Muzaffarpur said it was being overwhelmed with bodies, and grieving families had to wait their turn. A crematorium east of Delhi built funeral pyres in its parking lot. "Right now there are no beds, no oxygen. Everything else is secondary," said Shahid Jameel, a virologist and director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University. "The infrastructure is crumbling." Six hospitals in New Delhi had run out of oxygen, according to a tally shared by the city government, and the city's deputy chief minister said neighbouring states were holding back supplies for their own needs. "It might become difficult for hospitals here to save lives," Manish Sisodia said in a televised address. Another 2,104 people died in the space of a day, taking India's cumulative toll to 184,657, according to the health ministry data. The previous record rise in cases was in the United States, which had 297,430 new cases on one day in January, though its infection rate has since fallen sharply. "INDIA WEEPS" Television showed images of people with empty oxygen cylinders crowding refilling facilities, hoping to save relatives in hospital. In the western city of Ahmedabad, a man strapped to an oxygen cylinder lay in the back of a car outside a hospital as he waited for a bed. "Helplessness," tweeted former foreign secretary Nirupama Menon Rao. "India weeps." "We never thought a second wave would hit us so hard," Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, executive chairman of the healthcare firm Biocon, wrote in the Economic Times. "Complacency led to unanticipated shortages of medicines, medical supplies and hospital beds." Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said the city needed about 5,000 more intensive care beds. Similar surges of infections,notably in South America, are threatening to overwhelm other health services. China said it was willing to help India, although it was not immediately clear what this might consist of. Only a tiny fraction of the Indian population has received a vaccination. Authorities have announced vaccines will be available to anyone over 18 from May 1, but experts say there will not be enough for the 600 million people who will become eligible. Health experts say India let its guard down during the winter, when daily cases were about 10,000 and seemed to be under control, and lifted restrictions to allow big gatherings. MORE INFECTIOUS VARIANTS New, more infectious variants of the virus, in particular a "double mutant" variant that originated in India, have helped accelerate the surge, but many also blame the politicians. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government ordered an extensive lockdown in the early stages of the pandemic but has been wary of the economic costs of more tough restrictions. In recent weeks, the government has been criticised for holding packed political rallies for local elections and allowing a Hindu festival at which millions gathered. "The second wave is a consequence of complacency and mixing and mass gatherings. You don't need a variant to explain the second wave," said Ramanan Laxminarayan of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy in New Delhi. This week, Modi urged state governments to use lockdowns as a last resort. He asked people to stay indoors and said the government was working to expand oxygen and vaccine supplies. He cancelled a visit to West Bengal scheduled for Friday. A YouTube stream showed a hundred or more supporters attended Interior Minister Amit Shah's election rally in Harirampur on Thursday. Most donned saffron-coloured face-masks — in sharp contrast to the thousands seen at similar gatherings this month — but were still seated close together. "We are dying here, and they are holding rallies there," one woman in the northern city of Lucknow said on television. Madhukar Pai, professor of epidemiology at McGill University in Canada, said India was a cautionary tale for the world. “If we declare success too soon, open up everything, give up on public health, and not vaccinate rapidly, the new variants can be devastating,” he tweeted. (Article has tweets and photos)