India recorded Saturday its darkest day of the coronavirus pandemic yet with more than 4,180 confirmed deaths from COVID-19, according to a report by AXIOS on Sunday.
Since the pandemic broke out, India has recorded nearly 22 million COVID-19 cases and 238,270 fatalities. However, health experts believe the real figures could be much higher, as the country struggles to contain a continued increase in infections that have overwhelmed medical facilities and frontline personnel.
The country's health officials reported almost 4,190 deaths over the past 24 hours, putting the total death number close to 240,000. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates that India will have 1 million deaths from the virus by August.
The capital city of Karnataka, Bengaluru recorded the highest active cases of any city in India at more than 300,000, and hospitals there are in the verge of collapse because of oxygen shortages and congested crematoriums, the Associated Press reported.
Meanwhile, a COVID-19 variant spreading in India is more infectious and may be dodging vaccine protections, adding nightmare to India's worsening virus situation, the World Health Organization's chief scientist said.
"The epidemiological features that we see in India today do indicate that it's an extremely rapidly spreading variant," Indian paediatrician and clinical scientist Soumya Swaminathan told Agence France-Presse in an interview.
Swaminathan said the COVID-19 B.1.617 variant which was first detected in India last October was clearly a contributing factor to the calamity happening in her homeland.
India is yet to carry out a nationwide lockdown as it did during its first wave in 2020, but around half of all the country's states have implemented a total shutdown. The rest are under a partial shutdown.
As this developed, South Africa's health ministry on Saturday said it had detected the first four cases of a new coronavirus variant that emerged in India and was responsible for a spike in new virus cases and deaths in the Asian country, Reuters said.
