NEW DELHI — The desperation that engulfed New Delhi, India’s capital, over the past few weeks is now spreading across the country, hitting states and rural areas with many fewer resources.
Positivity rates are soaring in those states, and public health experts say that the rising numbers most likely fall far short of giving the true picture in places where sickness and deaths caused by covid-19 are harder to track.
It seems the crisis is reaching a new phase. Cases in New Delhi and Mumbai may be leveling off. But many other places are getting bowled over by runaway outbreaks. The World Health Organization now says that a new variant of the virus detected in India may be especially transmissible, which is just adding to the sense of alarm.
On Monday night, the Sri Venkateswara Ramnarain Ruia Government General Hospital, in Andhra Pradesh, was running low on medical oxygen. More than 60 patients were in critical condition, oxygen masks strapped to their faces. Doctors frantically called suppliers for help.
But the oxygen ran out, killing 11 people. Distraught family members became so enraged, hospital officials said, that they rushed into the intensive care unit, flipped over tables and smashed equipment. Televised images showed women clutching their heads, overwhelmed by grief. Doctors and nurses fled until police officers arrived.
India is suffering from a worrying shortage of medical oxygen, and at least 20 other hospitals have run out. Nearly 200 patients have died because of this, according to an Indian news site that has been tracking the string of deadly incidents.
At the same time, the national vaccine campaign is spluttering. The roughly 2 million doses that have been administered each day over the past few days are lower than the highs a few weeks ago, when some days the country gave out more than 3 million doses. Many people cannot find any appointments to get the shot. Some vaccination sites have completely run out, officials say.
All this is leading to the sharpest criticism that Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has faced since he came into office seven years ago. He has been widely accused of declaring premature victory over the coronavirus and encouraging his country to drop its guard.
Several party lawmakers in Uttar Pradesh, India’s biggest state and one controlled by Modi’s party, have begun to grumble about the way the state government has responded.
“There is no break in corona, and we are helplessly seeing our own people dying,” Lokendra Pratap Singh, a lawmaker from Modi’s party, wrote in a letter that quickly went viral.
Nationwide, the picture remains grim, even though things seem to be improving in India’s two biggest cities.
New Delhi reported 12,481 new infections Tuesday, less than half of what was reported April 30. And the positivity rate among people being tested for the coronavirus has been steadily falling in the city, to 19% from a troubling high of 36% a few weeks ago.
In Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, something similar has happened, and people are now allowing themselves to wonder if the worst has passed. Mumbai’s positivity rate has dropped to about 7% from roughly 25%.
Some of the worst affected states are now in the south, especially Karnataka, home to India’s tech hub, Bangalore. An oxygen express train, part of the Modi government’s effort to rush liquid oxygen to covid-19 hot spots, chugged into Bangalore on Tuesday morning.
But the state needs more.
Until this week, southern states had agreed to share oxygen supplies with each other. Now, some are arguing to stop the cooperation. Neighboring Kerala says it cannot ship out oxygen because it needs its entire supply for its own rising needs. Tamil Nadu, also in the south, is saying the same thing and that it cannot supply its poorer neighbor, Andhra Pradesh, where the 11 people died from the oxygen cutoff Monday night.
A particularly troubling omen came to a riverside village in Bihar, a rural state in northern India. In the village of Chausa, residents were feeling deeply uneasy after discovering dozens of bodies that mysteriously washed up on the banks of the Ganges.
Once in awhile, villagers said, they see a single corpse floating in the river. It is part of a custom in which some families send the bodies of their loved ones into the Ganges, the holiest river in Hinduism, weighted down by stones. But officials and residents in Chausa suspect that the unprecedented number of bodies they found this week belonged to victims of covid-19.
