Hospitals overwhelmed by COVID victims as beds, oxygen fall short

The Covid-19 case in India is getting more and more violent, as a result, hospitals in the country are overwhelmed to accommodate patients, even one bed is occupied by two people.

The number of Covid-19 cases in India has reached 200 thousand cases per day on Thursday. This figure is the highest in the world.

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One of the largest special COVID-19 hospitals in India, Lok Nayak Jai Prajkash Narayan Hospital (LNJP), ambulances do not stop passing patients. Some of the patients even came by bus and rickshaw.

Quoted from Reuters, the youngest patient is a newborn. "We are absolutely overwhelmed. We are already overworked," said the hospital's medical director, Suresh Kumar.

From the original 54 beds, the hospital now has more than 300 beds for patients with critical conditions. Some of the patients even had to share a bed, while the bodies lay outside the ward waiting to be transported to the morgue.

"Today we accept 158 ​​patients at Lok Nayak alone," he continued.

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After setting the world's strictest lockdown for 3 months last year, India then relaxed restrictions in early 2021. Some regions still have local restrictions in place.

According to Kumar, the new, more rapidly contagious variant that was not detected by the COVID-19 test added to the complexity of handling. Likewise, the behavior of residents changed when the lockdown was relaxed.

"People don't follow COVID's lead," he said. "They don't care."

"The situation is horrible," said Avinash Gawande, an official at a government hospital in the industrial city of Nagpur that was battling a flood of patients, as were hospitals in neighbouring Gujarat state and New Delhi in the north.

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However In wake of alarming rise in Covid cases in the city, the administration has decided to impose weekend curfews along with a host of other new restrictions in the national capital.

Besides the night curfews and weekend curfews, the government has also decided to close down all gyms, spas, malls and auditoriums.

The cinema halls will be operating at 30% capacity while only take-away food will be allowed in restaurants and eateries. The in house dining option has been  prohibited.

Outside a major city mortuary, weeping relatives gathered in the hot sun, waiting for the bodies of loved ones to be released.

Forty-year-old Prashant Mehra said he had to pay a broker for preferential treatment before he could get his 90-year-old grandfather admitted to an overstretched government hospital.

"He died after six or seven hours," he said.

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