DM Monitoring
NEW DELHI: India accounted for nearly half the coronavirus cases reported worldwide last week, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday, as COVID-19 deaths in the south Asian nation rose by a record 3,780 during the past 24 hours. In a weekly report, the WHO said India accounted for 46% of global cases and a quarter of global deaths reported in the past week. Daily infections rose by 382,315 on Wednesday, health ministry data showed. The number has been in excess of 300,000 every day for the past two weeks.
Hospitals are scrabbling for beds and oxygen as they desperately battle a second deadly surge in infections, while morgues and crematoriums struggle to deal with a seemingly unstoppable flow of bodies. Many people have died in ambulances and car parks waiting for a bed or oxygen. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been widely criticized for not acting sooner to suppress the second wave, as religious festivals and political rallies drew tens of thousands of people to “super spreader” events.
“We need a government. Desperately. And we don’t have one. We are running out of air. We are dying,” the Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy wrote in an opinion piece that called for Modi to step down. “This is a crisis of your making,” she added in the article published on Tuesday. “You cannot solve it. You can only make it worse. So please go. It is the most responsible thing for you to do. You have forfeited the moral right to be our prime minister.”
India’s delegation to the Group of Seven foreign ministers’ meeting in London is self-isolating after two of its members tested positive for COVID-19, Britain said on Wednesday. Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who is in London, said in a Twitter message that he would attend virtually. Broadcaster Sky News said Jaishankar did not test positive for the virus, however.
