NEW DELHI: More emergency medical aid from foreign donors to alleviate a dire oxygen shortage arrived in India on Sunday, as Covid-19 deaths in the South Asian nation rose to a new record.
India is setting almost-daily records for new infections and deaths as the virus crisis engulfs overstretched hospitals in cities and spreads into rural regions.
The country of 1.3 billion reported 3,689 deaths on Sunday — the highest single-day rise yet in the pandemic, to take the overall toll to more than 215,000.
Just under 400,000 infections were added, bringing the total number of cases past 19.5 million.
The latest figures came as medical equipment, including oxygen-generation plants, was flown into the capital New Delhi from France and Germany as part of a huge international effort.
“We are here because we are bringing help that... will save lives,” Germany’s ambassador to India, Walter J. Lindner, said as 120 ventilators arrived late Saturday.
“Out there the hospitals are full. People are sometimes dying in front of the hospitals. They have no more oxygen. Sometimes (they are dying) in their cars.”
French ambassador Emmanuel Lenain said his country wanted to show solidarity with India.
“The epidemic is still going on in one country. The world won’t be safe until we are all safe. So it’s a matter of urgency,” he said early Sunday following the delivery of eight oxygen-generation plants and dozens of ventilators from France.
India’s eastern state of Odisha on Sunday became the latest region to order a lockdown to slow the spread of the pathogen.
The nation’s worst-hit city, Delhi, reported just over 25,000 cases on Saturday as it extended its own lockdown by another week.
Hospitals in the capital continued to issue SOS calls for oxygen on social media, with the latest appeal posted by a children’s hospital on Twitter on Sunday.
The plea came a day after up to a dozen patients died at a Delhi hospital amid an oxygen shortage, local media reported.
There are also growing fears about the surge of the virus in small cities, towns and rural regions where health infrastructure is already patchy and limited.
India on Saturday opened up its inoculation drive to all adults, but supplies are running low and only online enrolments are allowed for those aged under 45.
“It is a necessity now. We are seeing so many people testing positive,” data scientist Megha Srivastava, 35, told AFP outside a Delhi vaccination center as she waited for her shot.
The head of the world’s largest vaccine maker, Serum Institute chief Adar Poonawalla, told The Times newspaper on Saturday during a business trip to Britain that he was being hounded by political and business leaders for more supplies.
“’Threats’ is an understatement,” he told the paper. “The level of expectation and aggression is really unprecedented. It’s overwhelming. Everyone feels they should get the vaccine.”
Experts have called on the government to allow more flexibility in India’s vaccine rollout, particularly in poorer rural areas where there is lower Internet penetration.
“We should procure sufficient vaccines, then plan bottom-up through... the primary health center level,” Bangalore-based public health expert Hemant Shewade told AFP.
“Take vaccines to the people the way we have implemented our polio and measles campaigns.”
Alarm bells are also ringing in other countries in densely populated South Asia.
“Infections have surged beyond the capacity of the health system,” Nepal’s health ministry said Friday as it warned that hospital beds were running out amid a spike in infections.
On Saturday, the Himalayan nation recorded 5,706 new cases, just shy of a pandemic high of 5,743 in October.
Nearly 40 percent of people tested returned a positive result, data from the ministry showed.
The government has enforced lockdowns or partial lockdowns in almost half of Nepal’s 77 districts.
In Sri Lanka, daily infections hit a record 1,699 on Saturday, with authorities imposing further curbs on movement and activities in parts of the island nation.
“We could face an India-type crisis very soon unless we arrest the current trend of infections,” chief epidemiologist Sudath Samaraweera said.
Lifesaving oxygen aid arrives in India as death toll hits new record
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Lifesaving oxygen aid arrives in India as death toll hits new record
Afghanistan says it thwarted Pakistani airstrike on Bagram Air Base as fighting enters fourth day
- The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years
- Pakistan accuses Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it
KABUL: Afghanistan thwarted attempted airstrikes on Bagram Air Base, the former US military base north of Kabul, authorities said Sunday, while cross-border fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan stretched into a fourth day.
The fighting has been the most severe between the neighbors for years, with Pakistan declaring that it’s in “open war” with Afghanistan.
The conflict has alarmed the international community, particularly as the area is one where other militant organizations, including Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group, still have a presence and have been trying to resurface.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it and also of allying with its archrival India.
Border clashes in October killed dozens of soldiers, civilians and suspected militants until a Qatari-mediated ceasefire ended the intense fighting. But several rounds of peace talks in Turkiye in November failed to produce a lasting agreement, and the two sides have occasionally traded fire since then.
On Sunday, the police headquarters of Parwan province, where Bagram is located, said in a statement that several Pakistani military jets had entered Afghan airspace “and attempted to bomb Bagram Air Base” at around 5 a.m.
The statement said Afghan forces responded with “anti-aircraft and missile defense systems” and had managed to thwart the attack.
There was no immediate response from Pakistan’s military or government regarding Kabul’s claim of attempted airstrikes on Bagram or the ongoing fighting.
Bagram was the United States’ largest military base in Afghanistan. It was taken over by the Taliban as they swept across the country and took control in the wake of the chaotic US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Last year, US President Donald Trump suggested he wanted to reestablish a US presence at the base.
The current fighting began when Afghanistan launched a broad cross-border attack on Thursday night, saying it was in retaliation for Pakistani airstrikes the previous Sunday.
Pakistan had said its airstrike had targeted the outlawed Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. Afghanistan had said only civilians were killed.
The TTP militant group, which is separate but closely allied with Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, operates inside Pakistan, where it has been blamed for hundreds of deaths in bombings and other attacks over the years.
Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of providing a safe haven within Afghanistan for the TTP, an accusation that Afghanistan denies.
After Thursday’s Afghan attack, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif declared that “our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us.”
In the ongoing fighting, each side claims to have killed hundreds of the other side’s forces — and both governments put their own casualties at drastically lower numbers.
Two Pakistani security officials said that Pakistani ground forces were still in control on Sunday of a key Afghan post and a 32-square-kilometer area in the southern Zhob sector near Kandahar province, after having seized it during fighting Friday. The captured post and surrounding area remain under Pakistani control, they added. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
In Kabul, the Afghan government rejected Pakistan’s claims. Deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat called the reports “baseless.”
Afghan officials said that fighting had continued overnight and into Sunday in the border areas.
The police command spokesman for Nangarhar province, Said Tayyeb Hammad, said that anti-aircraft missiles were used from the provincial capital, Jalalabad, and surrounding areas on Pakistani fighter jets flying overhead Sunday morning.
Defense Ministry spokesman Enayatulah Khowarazmi said that Afghan forces had launched counterattacks with snipers across the border from Nangarhar, Paktia, Khost and Kandahar provinces overnight. He said that two Pakistani drones had been shot down and dozens of Pakistani soldiers had been killed.
Fitrat said that Pakistani drone attacks hit civilian homes in Nangarhar province late Saturday, killing a woman and a child, while mortar fire killed another civilian when it hit a home in Paktia province.
There was no immediate response to the claims from Pakistani officials.
