Pandemic aid begins to arrive in COVID-stricken India

April 28 ------ The first emergency medical supplies arrived in India on Tuesday as part of a global campaign to staunch a catastrophic wave in the latest pandemic hotspot, with the United States also pledging to export millions of AstraZeneca vaccine doses. Crates of ventilators and oxygen concentrators from Britain were unloaded at a Delhi airport early Tuesday, the first emergency medical supplies to arrive in the country where infection and death rates are growing exponentially.

The explosion in infections in India — 350,000 new cases were recorded there on Tuesday alone — has driven a surge in global cases to 147.7 million and the virus has now killed more than 3.1 million people worldwide. In New Delhi, AFP images showed smoke billowing from dozens of pyres lit inside a parking lot that has been turned into a makeshift crematorium. “People are just dying, dying and dying,” said Jitender Singh Shanty, who is coordinating the cremation of around 100 bodies a day at the site in the east of the city.

“If we get more bodies then we will cremate on the road. There is no more space here.” Despite 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. Many doctors say remdesivir is not essential for the treatment of Covid-19, but hospitals have been prescribing it anyway. “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.

Source: mb.com.ph