© Provided by The iA newly-built hall for Covid-19 patients in Mumbai, India (Photo: Getty/Anadolu Agency/Imtiyaz Shaikh)
Hopes that India's deadly second wave of Covid-19 was about to peak were swept away on Thursday as the country posted record daily infections and deaths and as the virus spread from cities to villages across the world's second-most populous nation.
India reported a record 412,262 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours and a record 3,980 deaths. Covid-19 infections have now surged past 21 million, with a total death toll of 230,168, health ministry data shows.
With hospitals desperate for beds and oxygen in response to the surge in infections, the World Health Organisation said in its weekly report that India accounted for nearly half the coronavirus cases reported worldwide last week and a quarter of the deaths. India has 3.45 million active cases.
Medical experts say India's actual figures could be five to 10 times the official tallies.
Demand for hospital oxygen has increased sevenfold since last month, a government official said, as India scrambled to set up large oxygen plants and transport cryogenic tankers, cylinders and liquid oxygen.
India created a sea bridge on Tuesday to ferry oxygen tankers from Bahrain and Kuwait in the Persian Gulf, officials said.
Most hospitals in India are not equipped with independent plants that generate oxygen directly for patients. As a result, hospitals typically rely on liquid oxygen, which can be stored in cylinders and transported in cryogenic tankers. But amid the surge, supplies in hard-hit places such as New Delhi are running critically short.
India's health minister Harsh Vardhan said India has enough liquid oxygen but it is facing capacity constraint in moving it. Most oxygen is produced in the eastern parts of India while the demand has risen in northern and western parts.
K Vijay Raghvan, a principal scientific adviser to the Indian government, said this phase of the pandemic was "a very critical time for the country".
Britain, the US, Germany and several other nations have sent therapeutics, rapid virus tests and oxygen, along with materials needed to boost the domestic production of Covid-19 vaccines, to ease pressure on the fragile health infrastructure.
India's vaccine production is expected to get a boost with the US supporting a waiver of intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines.