Spain said it will impose a 10-day quarantine on all travellers arriving from India beginning Wednesday.Īustralia has also cut all passenger air travel with India, suspending flights until at least May 15, leaving a host of high-profile cricketers stuck there after playing in the lucrative Indian Premier League. The initial assistance included 365 ventilators and 700 oxygen concentrators – machines that purify the air supply by removing nitrogen – from Ireland, 120 ventilators from Sweden, 58 ventilators from Luxembourg, 80 oxygen concentrators from Romania, and thousands of doses of remdesivir from Belgium and Portugal.Īt the same time, many countries are shutting their borders to travellers from India.īelgium became the latest, also banning travel from Brazil and South Africa, similarly hit by fast-spreading coronavirus variants. France also said it would send eight oxygen production units, oxygen containers and respirators to India.Īnd the EU said the first shipment of aid from the bloc’s member states to India would be delivered “over the coming days.” “India was there for us, and we will be there for them,” Biden tweeted, referencing India’s support for the United States when it was enduring the worst of its Covid crisis. While Washington has not decided yet which countries will be the recipients, India appears to be a leading contender after Biden spoke with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On Monday Biden announced the United States would send up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine abroad. The US, France, Germany, Canada, the EU and the World Health Organization have all promised to rush supplies to India. “This government has failed us so much that those who can normally survive also die,” said one exhausted man, Vinod Kumar, as he waited in line for medication. Many doctors say the drug is not essential for the treatment of Covid-19, but hospitals have been prescribing it anyway. That label would indicate that it is more dangerous that the original version of the virus by for instance being more transmissible, deadly or able to dodge vaccine protections.ĭespite India’s status as the “pharmacy of the world”, the biggest producer of generic drugs has been unable to meet the demand for antiviral medication such as remdesivir. The WHO recently listed B.1.617 - which counts several sub-lineages with slightly different mutations and characteristics - as a “variant of interest” but so far it has stopped short of declaring it a “variant of concern”. “Most sequences were uploaded from India, the United Kingdom, USA and Singapore,” the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update on the pandemic. India Today said that crematoriums were expanding to manage the surging death tolls. The Hindustan Times said families were waiting up to 20 hours to cremate their loved ones as crematoriums were full. Officials were also looking for additional space near the city’s Yamuna river bed. It said 27 new pyres had been built in the capital’s Sarai Kale Khan crematorium and dozens more were being added in a nearby park. The BBC reported that trees in parks were being cut down to use in funeral pyres and relatives of the dead were being asked to help pile up wood. As the death toll mounts, the night skies in some Indian cities glow from the pyres. Experts believe the official tally vastly under-estimates the actual toll in the country of 1.3 billion, with populous states such as Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat accused of undercounting Covid-19 fatalities and cases. A further 3,293 deaths, the deadliest day so far, took the death toll to 201,187. In the past 24 hours, 360,960 new cases were recorded, the largest single-day total in the world, taking India’s total to nearly 18 million. The second wave has seen at least 300,000 people a day test positive for the past week, overwhelming healthcare facilities and crematoriums and driving an increasingly urgent international response. India’s Covid-19 death toll surged past 200,000 on Wednesday as shortages of oxygen, medical supplies and hospital staff compounded a record number of new cases of the virus. Workers are seen constructing makeshift platforms for funeral pyres in a park inside the premises of a crematorium in Delhi Photograph: Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images
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