NEW DELHI: There isn’t any room at Sion Hospital in India’s megacity, Mumbai – approximately all 500 beds reserved for COVID-19 patients are occupied. And with new patients coming in daily, a doctor said the hospital is being forced to add beds every second day.
Waiting lists in some hospitals in the city are so unreasonable that “numbers can’t define the burden on hospitals,” said Dr. Om Shrivastava, an infectious diseases expert.
Scenes like this were common last year, when India looked set to become the worst affected country with daily cases nearly crossing 100,000. For several months, infections had receded, baffling experts, then since February, cases have climbed faster than before with a seven-day rolling average of 59,000. On Thursday, India reported more than 72,000 cases, its highest spike in six months.
“I think it’s going to be worse (than last year),” said Shrivastava. “If it doesn’t quell in a few months time, we may be in for the long haul.”
Experts say there is a pressing need for India to bolster vaccinations, which started sluggishly in January. The country is expanding its drive to include everyone over 45 years from Thursday.
But scaling up vaccinations in India has implications beyond its borders. Spotlight on Serum Institute of India – the world’s largest maker of vaccines and key global supplier – to cater to cases at home has resulted in delays of global shipments of up to 90 million doses under the UN-backed COVAX program, an initiative devised to give countries access to vaccines regardless of their wealth. Serum Institute declined to comment.
This could have negative consequences worldwide, setting back supplies in developing countries reliant on Indian exports. But some health experts argue that India’s rising caseload is a global public health problem too.
India has exported more vaccines, 64 million doses, than it has administered its own population at 62 million doses, official data showed.
Irrespective of where vaccines are being made, we need to send them to “places where you’re seeing an upward trajectory,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who has been tracking the pandemic in India.
And India certainly qualifies: Nearly all its 28 states have seen a rise. Six states account for more than 78 percent of India’s total caseload, which at 12 million is the third-highest in the world. Cases have increased six-fold in less than two months, and deaths – a lagging indicator in the pandemic that follows hospitalization – are rising too.
Maharashtra state, home to Mumbai, is behind 60 percent of daily cases and accounts for about the same percentage of active cases. Capital New Delhi and states of Punjab, Karnataka, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh are also among the worst-hit.
After a grinding lockdown and falling cases, life in India had returned to normal in many places. Markets are teeming with people, politicians are addressing massive rallies in local elections and a religious gathering in Uttarakhand state is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of devotees in April.
International travel has also resumed in high volumes, bringing in variants first detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. These variants, designated as those of concern, were found in 7 percent of nearly 11,000 samples sequenced since Dec. 30.
India also confirmed a new and potentially troublesome variant at home. Officials have cautioned against linking the variants to the surge, and experts say more expansive genomic analysis is needed to determine how much they are contributing to the rise.
The new infections have also cast doubt over herd immunity – the threshold at which enough people have developed immunity to the virus, by falling sick or being vaccinated – which was floated by some experts earlier this year to explain dropping cases. The last nationwide serological survey found that 21.4 percent of adults had been infected before vaccinations began in January, implying that a large section of India’s nearly 1.4 billion population remains vulnerable.
“It’s a perfect storm of careless crowd behavior, laxity in government vigilance and a misleading perception of herd immunity,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India. “The virus rode through gates which were left wide open.”
India fights coronavirus surge, steps up jabs amid export row
https://arab.news/n2mse
India fights coronavirus surge, steps up jabs amid export row
- Experts say there is a pressing need for India to bolster vaccinations, which started sluggishly in January
- India confirmed a new and potentially troublesome variant at home
Magnitude 7.5 quake in northern Japan injures 23 people and triggers a 2-foot tsunami
- A tsunami of up to 70 centimeters (2 feet, 4 inches) was measured in Kuji port in Iwate prefecture, just south of Aomori, and tsunami levels of up to 50 centimeters struck other coastal communities in the region, the Japan Meteorological Agency said
TOKYO: A powerful 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck off northern Japan late Monday, injuring 23 people and triggering a tsunami in Pacific coast communities, officials said. Authorities warned of possible aftershocks and an increased risk of a megaquake.
The Japanese government was still assessing damages from the tsunami and late-evening quake, which struck at about 11:15 p.m. in the Pacific Ocean, around 80 kilometers (50 miles) off the coast of Aomori, the northernmost prefecture of Japan’s main Honshu island.
“I’ve never experienced such a big shaking,” convenience store owner Nobuo Yamada told the public broadcaster NHK in the Aomori prefecture town of Hachinohe, adding that “luckily” power lines were still operating in his area.
A tsunami of up to 70 centimeters (2 feet, 4 inches) was measured in Kuji port in Iwate prefecture, just south of Aomori, and tsunami levels of up to 50 centimeters struck other coastal communities in the region, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.
The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said 23 people were injured, including one seriously. Most of them were hit by falling objects, NHK reported, adding that several people were injured in a hotel in Hachinohe and a man in Tohoku was slightly hurt when his car fell into a hole.
The meteorological agency reported the quake’s magnitude as 7.5, down from its earlier estimate of 7.6. It issued an alert for potential tsunami surges of up to 3 meters (10 feet) in some areas and later downgraded to an advisory.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara urged residents to go to higher ground or seek shelter until adviseries were lifted. He said about 800 homes were without electricity, and that the Shinkansen bullet trains and some local lines were suspended in parts of the region.
Nuclear power plants in the region were conducting safety checks, Kihara said. The Nuclear Regulation Authority said about 450 liters (118 gallons) of water spilled from a spent fuel cooling area at the Rokkasho fuel reprocessing plant in Aomori, but that its water level remained within the normal range and there was no safety concern.
About 480 residents were taking shelter at the Hachinohe Air Base, and 18 defense helicopters were mobilized for a damage assessment, Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said.
About 200 passengers were stranded for the night at New Chitose Airport in Hokkaido, NHK reported.
The meteorological agency issued a caution about possible aftershocks in the coming days. It said there is a slight increase in risk of a magnitude 8-level quake and possible tsunami occurring along Japan’s northeastern coast from Chiba, just east of Tokyo, to Hokkaido. The agency urged residents in 182 municipalities in the area to monitor their emergency preparedness in the coming week.
Satoshi Kato, a vice principal of a public high school in Hachinohe, told NHK that he was at home when the quake struck, and that glasses and bowls fell and smashed into shards on the floor.
Kato said he drove to the school because it was designated an evacuation center, and on the way he encountered traffic jams and car accidents as panicked people tried to flee. Nobody had yet come to the school to take shelter, he said.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in brief comments to reporters that the government set up an emergency task force to urgently assess the extent of damage. “We are putting people’s lives first and doing everything we can,” she said.
Later, she urged residents in the region to pay attention to the latest information from local municipalities. “Please be prepared so you can immediately evacuate as soon as you feel a tremor.”
The quake struck about 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Hachinohe, and about 50 kilometers (30 miles) below the sea surface, the meteorological agency said.
It was just north of the Japanese coast that suffered the magnitude 9.0 quake and tsunami in 2011 that killed nearly 20,000 people and destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
“You need to prepare, assuming that a disaster like that could happen again,” the meteorological agency’s earthquake and volcano division official Satoshi Harada said.
At 6:20 a.m. on Tuesday morning, authorities lifted all tsunami adviseries for the Pacific coastline in northern Japan, NHK said.
The US Geological Survey reported another earthquake, with a magnitude 5.1, early on Tuesday, about 122 kilometers (76 miles) south of Honcho, at a depth of 35 kilometers. No other details were immediately available.
