COVID SURGE

BRITAIN has pledged to support India in its battle against the devastating Covid surge which has brought the country to its knees.

The UK Government said it is “looking at what we can do to help” after India recorded 332,000 new cases in a single day.

Hospitals across the nation are buckling under the strain of a ferocious second wave, with some running out of oxygen and turning away patients due to overcrowding.

Reports have indicated that 2,263 deaths were recorded in India yesterday, although limited testing capacity means this is likely to significantly underestimate the total.

The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, said: “We’re looking at what we can do to help and support the people of India, possibly with ventilators. Thanks to the ventilator challenge, the huge efforts of British manufacturers, we’re better able now to deliver ventilators to other countries. But also possibly with therapeutics, Dexamethasone, other things, we’ll look at what we can do to help.”

Yesterday, India recorded 332,730 new infections – the highest one-day tally of any country since the beginning of the pandemic. It was the second day running the country of around 1.4billion people broke the record.

India is now recording one in three of all worldwide Covid 19 cases. Ministers declared victory against the virus two months ago when there were around 11,000 cases a day.

The surge has been fuelled by a “double mutant” variant, thought to be more infectious.

So far 132 cases of the Indian variant have been detected in Britain, around half of which are in London. The variant contains two mutations in the virus’s spike protein, which could help it spread more easily and evade vaccines. India has been added to the UK’s travel “red list”, prompting a last minute scramble for flights to Heathrow. The Prime Minister has also cancelled a trip to Delhi which was scheduled to go ahead this weekend where he had hoped to secure millions of vaccine doses.

Government scientists have said that the current border measures in place are not enough to prevent the spread of new variants, but they can delay it. One senior scientist said there were likely to be “many more” cases of the Indian variant in the UK than the 132 detected so far. It is acknowledged that the Indian variant is more transmissible than the base virus although it isn’t known if it’s more transmissible than the Kent variant due to lack of data on vaccine efficacy.

Desperate families in India have been begging for oxygen or medical help on social media, and crowds have gathered outside hospitals with some dying on stretchers as they wait.

Three days ago, 22 patients died at a hospital in Maharashtra when their oxygen supply ran out after a leak in the tank. Yesterday, 13 Covid patients died when a fire broke out at a Mumbai hospital.

Dr Atul Gogia, who works at a hospital in Delhi, said: “We do have oxygen but it’s now on a day-to-day basis. We got some oxygen last night, so we have some oxygen now.” He also added: “We do not have enough oxygen points, patients are coming in with their own oxygen, others without, we want to help them but there are not enough beds or oxygen points, and not enough oxygen to supply them.”

Max Healthcare, which runs hospitals in northern and western India, has appealed on Twitter for oxygen at its facility in Delhi. The company said, “We regret to inform that we are suspending any new patient admissions in all our hospitals in Delhi until oxygen supplies stabilise.”

The government has started shuttling trains containing tanks of oxygen across the country to hotspots. Crematoriums are also overwhelmed, with one in Delhi resorting to building pyres in its car park.