India recorded more than 300,000 coronavirus infections and 2,100 deaths in the last 24 hours as a national healthcare system on the verge of collapse struggles to overcome mutant virus strains and a widespread oxygen shortage.
Over the span of a week, the country reported roughly 1.6 million new cases and thousand more dead. The national COVID-19 positivity rate hit 17% while Delhi saw an increase in infections affecting 30% of the city's population.
"The Covid-19 situation in Delhi is grim," chief minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, said earlier this week.
Nearly 500 tons of oxygen arrived in the city on Wednesday, 200 tons short of the daily amount required by hospitals in the capital overflowing with patients.
The dire situation has prompted unprecedented actions to divert remaining supplies for medical use. On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court forced the government to take oxygen tanks meant for industrial use and distribute them among hospitals.
But this hasn't prevented thousands of people, many in their early 20s, from succumbing to their symptoms.
"Victory was declared prematurely and that ebullient mood was communicated across the country, especially by politicians who wanted to get the economy going and wanted to get back to campaigning," India's Public Health Foundation president K. Srinath Reddy said.
This variant seems to affect the young hardest. In Delhi, 65% of the cases are among people below the age of 40.
Outside of the capital, state governments across the country are now desperately trying to assemble COVID-19 field hospitals and temporary facilities that had been erected and later dismantled months earlier after the first pandemic wave.
"There are people lined up outside the hospital trying to get in and every day we are getting calls every 30 seconds from someone trying to find a bed," Dr. Amit Thadhani in Mumbai said.
Most of these calls are for patients who are critically ill and do need hospital care but there just isn't enough capacity and so there is a lot of mortality happening. Everyone has been stretched to their limit."
By Monday, 99% of intensive care unit beds in Mumbai were occupied and a day later several leading hospitals declared oxygen emergencies like Delhi.
Morgues across India are also struggling to cope with an influx of bodies which may be even worse than the numbers suggest.
In Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, local governments are being accused of concealing the real death toll inflicted by the virus, as the number of corpses stacked outside crematoriums outweigh official fatality records.
