India becomes first country to hit 400,000 daily Covid cases

With its health system already strained beyond the brink, India has become the first country in the world to report more than 400,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day.

After 10 consecutive days of recording more than 300,000 new infections, India added a further 401,993 cases – and 3,523 deaths – to its official tally on Saturday. These totals significantly exceed the previous global record of 297,430 daily cases set by the United States in January.

And experts analysing the trajectory of India’s devastating second wave believe not only that this new record fails to reflect the true, higher number of actual cases and deaths, but that the country’s current outbreak is yet to hit its peak.

As a lack of beds, ventilators and oxygen in many hospitals continue to see would-be patients denied access to health facilities, scientists from the Indian Institutes of Technology estimated this week that daily new infections could reach as high as 440,000 between 4-8 May – with active cases expected to peak at 3,800,000 to 4,800,000 between 14-18 May.

Meanwhile on Saturday, the Indian government opened its stumbling vaccination programme to all of its 1.36 billion inhabitants over the age of 18.

While India is one of the world’s largest producers of vaccines, it has so far struggled with a mass inoculation programme previously open to those aged 45 and over.

Since January, nearly 10 per cent of India’s population has received one dose, with some 1.5 per cent having received a second.

The country’s second-most populous state of Maharashtra said it wouldn’t be able to start vaccinating the new cohort on Saturday, while Delhi’s health minister Satyender Jain said earlier this week that the city doesn’t have enough doses to vaccinate people aged 18 to 44.

Hospitals in Delhi continued to warn of emergencies based on unsteady oxygen supplies. Twelve coronavirus patients died on Friday after oxygen ran out for 80 minutes at Batra hospital, including the head of its gastroenterology department.

And for the second time in just over a week, patients died after a fire broke out in a hospital on Saturday.

Eighteen patients died in the blaze at the Welfare Hospital in Bharuch, a town in Gujarat state, while 31 others were rescued. It comes after a fire at an intensive care unit in Virar, on the outskirts of Mumbai, killed at least 13 Covid patients, thought to have been fuelled in part by the use of alcoholic hand sanitiser and thick, ventilation-stifling curtains.

After holding a meeting of his cabinet on Friday to discuss steps aimed at tackling the crippling shortages in hospital beds, medicines and oxygen, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi described the pandemic as a “once-in-a-generation crisis”.

Hours later – after allegations that Mr Modi acted with complacency in the lull between Covid waves, failing to patch holes in the health system and allowing mass religious and political gatherings to proceed – a report emerged alleging that the Indian government had failed to act on scientists’ warnings of a new variant back in March.

Reuters reported five members of the Indian Sars-CoV-2 Genetics Consortium, or INSACOG – set up by the government to monitor new genetic changes in the virus – as saying that the forum had warned top officials of the dangerous new variant taking hold in the country.

But despite this warning, four of the scientists said, the federal government did not seek to impose major restrictions to stop the spread of the virus.

One of those quoted, the director of a research centre in northern India who spoke on condition of anonymity, alleged that INSACOG shared its findings about the new “double mutant” variant B.1.617 – and a warning that it could quickly see infections rise in parts of the country – with the health ministry’s National Centre for Disease Control before 10 March.

The anonymous individual alleged that this information was conveyed to a top official who reports directly to Mr Modi, whose office did not respond to a request for comment.

“Policy has to be based on evidence and not the other way around,” Shahid Jameel, chair of the scientific advisory group of INSACOG, told Reuters. “I am worried that science was not taken into account to drive policy. But I know where my jurisdiction stops.

“As scientists we provide the evidence, policy-making is the job of the government.”

Additional reporting by agencies