A U.S. Air Force transport aircraft unloads New Crown outbreak relief supplies at the cargo terminal at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. (April 30, 2021)
The first critical shipment of emergency medical supplies from the United States arrived in India Friday (April 30). India has been hit by a second wave of the new coronavirus outbreak and is now in a humanitarian crisis.
The death toll in India has skyrocketed to more than 200,000, and as the number of cases rises relentlessly, India’s health care system has effectively collapsed and efforts to save lives are becoming increasingly frantic.
A U.S. Super Galaxy military transport plane has brought more than 400 oxygen tanks and other hospital supplies to New Delhi, as well as equipment for rapid testing of the new coronavirus. U.S. officials also said they will continue to deliver equipment donated by companies and individuals through special flight operations next week.
U.S. President Joe Biden vowed to support India’s fight against the epidemic. State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement that Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke Friday with Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar to “reaffirm the strength of the U.S.-India partnership in the face of the new coronavirus pandemic “
“Secretary Blinken expressed appreciation for India’s assistance in a time of need for the United States and reviewed the full range of ongoing U.S. support for the Indian government’s neo-coronavirus response operations,” Price said. “He also cited the overwhelming support of U.S. industry, nongovernmental agencies and ordinary citizens for India’s efforts to mitigate the outbreak.”
About 40 countries, including major powers such as Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Japan, as well as smaller countries such as Thailand and Taiwan, have pledged to send medical supplies as part of a global effort to address India’s critical oxygen and medicine shortages. China, which has strained relations with India, has also expressed a willingness to send aid.
“We are facing an unprecedented second wave of a pandemic,” Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla said Thursday.
For ordinary citizens, this “unprecedented” situation means a desperate struggle to save the lives of loved ones. Social media continues to be filled with cries of distress, as people beg for oxygen, hospital beds, intensive care units, medicine and even wood to cremate the dead. With crematoriums overwhelmed, grieving relatives must wait in line into the night for a final farewell to their loved ones.
While the Indian capital was one of the places hardest hit by the second wave of the epidemic, the virus was also raging in other parts of the country.
To add insult to injury, there is a shortage of vaccines in India. Several Indian states have said they will not be able to expand their vaccination programs to people over the age of 18 from Saturday as planned because they don’t have them in stock. So far, the vaccination drive has been limited to people over 45.
With hospitals overwhelmed, the Indian Army has opened several military hospitals to civilians and set up medical facilities in several cities.
In the face of angry public outcry, the Indian government defended itself. Health Minister Hersh Vardhan (Harsh Vardhan) said this week that India’s death rate per million people is the lowest in the world, and that the oxygen supply is “adequate.
According to the Indian Ministry of Health, India has reported 386,452 new cases in the past 24 hours, and the number of deaths from the new coronavirus disease has jumped by 3,498. For more than a week, India has been reporting more than 300,000 new infections per day, a global record.
But many experts say the official death toll in India, and the 18.8 million total cases, is less than the actual number. Others have criticized India for not paying enough attention to a new variant of the new coronavirus that is spreading through the population.
About 350 scientific and medical researchers have appealed online to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to allow them access to government data, including data on genetic sequencing of virus variants, testing and recovered patients, to help study, predict and contain the spread of the new coronavirus. These data are currently not available to non-government experts.
The appeal says, “While new pandemics may have unpredictable characteristics, our inability to adequately control the spread of infection results in large part from the failure to systematically collect epidemiological data and publish them to the scientific community in a timely manner.”
Public health experts say the collapse of India’s health facilities due to the surge in cases was due to complacency on the part of health officials during the six-month period when cases were declining, believing that the worst of the epidemic was over and thus neglecting efforts to ramp up health infrastructure.
“We were clearly underprepared for the second wave. A lot of temporary facilities and personnel were withdrawn after the first wave,” said Anant Bhan, a public health expert. “So when the cases increased, we found that we were under-resourced. The second problem was that we were taking it too lightly. There was little adherence to public health measures such as wearing masks, and large religious and political events were held, which contributed to the contagion. The new variants are more contagious and that has led to the current situation.”
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