Already at the beginning of 2021, the health authorities in India went out and declared that they had defeated the coronavirus, despite experts warned against it.
In the city of Haridwar, located along the sacred river Ganges in the north of the country, more than 1,000 people were infected with corona after the week-long Hindu festival Kumbh Mela. It writes Aljazeera.
This new peak of corona cases is now being discussed about the second wave for India.
New double mutation discovered in India
Worried
In Tamil Nadu, which is located in the southwest of the country, there is an ongoing election. It has led to large political demonstrations in the state, writes the British newspaper The Guardian.
The president of the Tamil Nadu State Medical Council and urologist Dr. K Senthil told The Guardian that he was concerned that the population was behaving as if the virus did not exist.
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– Now we are experiencing a wave of coronavirus that is far much worse than the first, and the extent of the spread is only getting worse and worse. In Tamil Nadu, it has taken only 15 days to reach the same number of patients in the hospitals that were at the top last time. In the big cities of the state, the hospitals are already almost full, he tells the newspaper.
Gloomy numbers
This week, India overtook Brazil in being the country with the second highest infection in the world. The United States is still at the top, with over 31 million in total. According to figures from Johns Hopkins In the last 14 days, a total of 1,724,490 cases of covid-19 have been registered.
Over the past week, the country has seen new dismal infection records daily. On Tuesday, 184,372 cases were registered, which is the highest number of days the country has ever seen.
In total, more than 172,000 people have died in the country, and they have had a total of over 13.8 million cases of infection since March last year.
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New double mutation
In early March, it was reported that a new double mutation of the virus was found. It has become known as the B1617 mutation, and one of the properties of the mutation is that it should be more contagious, among other things.
It has been reported that the double mutation has been detected in 20 percent of cases in India.
Similar to Norwegian mutations
The Guardian writes that the authorities are accused of being slow in mapping the genetic material of corona cases in recent months, and therefore not had the opportunity to capture possible new variants.
Both the Brazilian and British mutations are also ravaging the country. In the state of Punjab, 80 percent of the latest cases of infection have been shown to be the British mutation.
Blown up Hospital capacity
Over the weekend, dead bodies could be seen scattered on the streets outside the hospital in the city of Raipur, because the hospital “did not expect so many to die at the same time”.
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“This tsunami” of contagion has already blown up the health care infrastructure in this state, “said Dr. Shashank Joshi, a member of the Mumbai Corona Working Group, according to The Guardian.
In the town of Surat, crematoria were so overcrowded with corona dead that families began burning the bodies in the open.
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