U.S. flights carrying urgent coronavirus aid for India were en route Thursday, the White House said in a statement, as health officials reported another record number of new cases across the country.
The U.S. government will deliver more than $100 million worth of supplies for overstretched hospitals and front-line health-care workers in India, the White House said late Wednesday, including oxygen support, personal protective equipment, therapeutics and rapid diagnostic tests.
India’s Health Ministry on Thursday reported 379,257 new infections — a global record — and 3,645 deaths, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to more than 18 million. The official death toll reached more than 204,000, a figure experts say is a vast undercount of virus-related deaths.
The devastating surge has strangled India’s health-care infrastructure, sapping critical oxygen reserves and hospital beds and crippling a nascent vaccination campaign.
India’s armed forces were setting up field hospitals and would open medical facilities to civilians “wherever possible,” according to a statement Thursday from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office.
The State Department late Wednesday urged U.S. citizens to refrain from traveling to India “or to leave as soon as it is safe to do so” due to the surge in coronavirus cases. ...
The White House said Wednesday that the United States has “redirected its own order of AstraZeneca manufacturing supplies to India,” allowing it to produce more than 20 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine that the British-Swedish company developed with Oxford University. ...
About 10 percent of India’s population of nearly 1.4 billion has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, after an immunization program targeting vulnerable populations began in January. Since then, however, the campaign has struggled to get off the ground.
In the meantime, authorities relaxed public health restrictions and greenlighted religious festivals and mass political rallies, assuming the pandemic was under control. Those moves and the appearance of more virulent virus variants seeded outbreaks that have engulfed the nation.
“The current wave is particularly dangerous,” Reuters quoted the chief minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, as saying. “It is supremely contagious and those who are contracting it are not able to recover as swiftly. In these conditions, intensive care wards are in great demand.” ...
ALSO SEE: ANALYSIS: Background to India’s Coronavirus Crisis --NY Times
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