L’India recorded more than 400,000 new cases of coronavirus on Saturday in the past 24 hours, a world first, the health ministry said. Some 401,993 new infections have been identified, bringing the total in that country to more than 19.1 million. The number of deaths over the last 24 hours was 3,523, for a total of 211,853 deaths. Many experts believe the real numbers are much higher due to insufficient testing and inaccurate registration of the cause of death.
Indian authorities loosened restrictions on most activities at the start of the year, when the number of infections fell below 10,000 per day. Mass religious gatherings, such as the Kumbh Mela, attracting millions of Hindu pilgrims, as well as political rallies were allowed to continue even when the number of cases started to rise sharply in late March. In April alone, India detected around 7 million new infections. However, the contagion reported to the entire population remains relatively low compared to many other countries.
Sixteen patients and two nurses die in fire
At least sixteen patients with Covid-19 and two nurses died Saturday morning in the fire at the hospital where they were, we learned from an official source, a new episode of fire in hospital environments overwhelmed by the epidemic. There were around 50 other patients at the four-story hospital in Bharuch, western Gujarat state, when the fire broke out at 1 a.m. local time. It has since been extinguished. The death toll rose to eighteen, “including sixteen patients and two nurses,” Rajendrasinh Chudasama of the local police told Agence France-Presse. “The first elements of the investigation revealed that the fire had started following a short circuit in the intensive care unit of the hospital,” he said.
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Previously, twenty-two other coronavirus patients had died in a hospital, still in the same state, when the oxygen supply to their ventilators was interrupted by a leak. India’s healthcare system has long suffered from underfunding, and the current epidemic has resulted in critical shortages of oxygen, medicine and hospital beds, with patients dying outside hospitals in some areas.
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