County reports more than 400,000 new infections but experts suspect figures are gross underestimate
Covid-19 deaths surged past 4,000 for the first time in India on Saturday in one of the world’s worst outbreaks.
India reported a national record of 4,187 new deaths on Saturday.
Continue reading...The pandemic overwhelming the big cities is reaching areas of Bihar where there is one doctor for 40,000 people
In the small rural village of Kathail, in the east of India’s poorest state, Bihar, access to healthcare has always been scarce. But when 34-year-old Umakant Singh fell sick with a cough and fever last week, his brother Mantu Singh did all he could to find help.
For four days Mantu rushed around, collecting the limited medicines he could find for his younger brother and nursing him at home. But he knew what these symptoms meant: Covid-19 had reached their village.
Continue reading...The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has told a Senate hearing on Covid-19 there are 173 unaccompanied children in India who are trying to return to Australia. More than 9,500 Australians are stranded in the country, 950 of them classed as vulnerable, following a flight ban from India that will end on 15 May. Australian airline Qantas doesn’t take unaccompanied minors, potentially limiting options to come home through Air India or special repatriation flights
Continue reading...Scott Morrison says India travel ban will not be extended and has committed to three repatriation flights before the end of May. Follow latest updates
The Covid-19 inquiry is hearing from Australians stranded in India, including Sunny, who traveled to India in May 2020 because his father was in a critical condition with no support during India’s coronavirus lockdown.
Sunny’s father passed away on 1 June 2020 while Sunny was in hotel quarantine in Dehli. He wants to bring his mother home to Australia with him, but his flights in July 2020 were cancelled due to the Melbourne lockdown.
Sunny said it was “next to impossible” to come back with 10,000 stranded Australians seeking seats on Air India flights and no Qantas repatriation flights until November. He paid $10,000 to fly to Australia from Japan, but was bumped from the flight.
Sunny said the Australian government had been “totally insensitive to stranded Australians” after he suffered “11 months of misery”.
Sunny and his mother live in an area experiencing a “tsunami of infections”, with 60-70% of people on the street infected with Covid-19. He said they lived holed up in the house “in fear for our lives” but worried it was only a matter of time before they were infected.
Sunny quoted the advice of the chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, that the India travel ban could, in the worst-case scenario, result in the death of Australians in India.
He called for a comprehensive schedule of repatriation flights to get all Australians in India and elsewhere home.
Meg, another Australian in India, has told the committee she was stranded in India after she travelled there on holiday in January 2020.
Meg was unable to fly back in October when her Cathay Pacific flight via Hong Kong was cancelled, and she hasn’t been able to get a seat in the “raffle” of respite or charter flights.
She said:
The daily fear of going out and contracting Covid was with us every day and it it still is now, the situation is so bad. The Australian government hasn’t provided any kind of emotional support to those stranded in India. We are part of Facebook and Whatsapp groups – people are depressed about the situation. Emotionally people are so down and depressed.
We haven’t really received anything from the high commission. Every time I’ve called for help, guidance, the phone would just ring out no matter how many times you call.
The website for the new Labor campaign we mentioned earlier is now live. It is seen as a bit of an opening salvo for an election which could be more than a year away.
Continue reading...Country appeals for international help, with vaccines in short supply and a reported 47% positivity rate
Nepal is struggling to contain an explosion in Covid-19 cases, as fears grow that the situation in the Himalayan country may be as bad, if not worse, than in neighbouring India, with which it shares a long and porous border.
Following warnings by health officials earlier this week that the country was on the brink of losing control of its outbreak, Nepal has appealed for urgent international help.
Continue reading...More than 9,000 Australians remain trapped in India by the Coalition’s Covid travel ban. Many travelled before the crisis to visit sick and dying relatives, and say they are angry at their treatment. Here are six of their stories
The backlash has been fierce in the days since the Australian government moved to make it a criminal offence for its citizens to return from Covid-ravaged India.
Members of the Morrison government have denounced their own policy, while medical experts and international human rights groups, including the United Nations, have called for an immediate reversal of the Biosecurity Act determination.
Continue reading...India records 357,229 new daily cases; law that would lift curbs for those with all jabs discriminates against young people who won’t be able to get jabs for months
Here is Guardian Australia’s morning mail.
Related: Morning mail: GPs grapple with vaccine shortfalls, Pfizer’s $34bn revenue, giant Joe Biden
North Macedonia’s Covid-19 vaccination program picked up speed Tuesday, with authorities starting to use 200,000 Sinopharm jabs bought from China.
The European Union’s top official for enlargement, Oliver Varhelyi, also delivered about 5,000 Pfizer-BioNTech doses to North Macedonia, Associated Press reports.
That is part of a batch of 120,000 the 27-nation bloc will donate to the country by the end of August.
Continue reading...Concerned British doctors of Asian heritage says India’s Covid crisis needs a strong global response
The streets of Delhi are known for their noise, crowds, and bustle, but Meenal Vis, a UK doctor, says that when her family there listen out of their windows there is “pin-drop silence”.
“It is almost like living in a horror film. People are not sure what will come next,” she said. “The kind of feeling described is a country in a war.”
Continue reading...Indian government accused of complacency, with shortage of jabs likely to continue ‘for months’
Severe Covid-19 vaccine shortages have hampered India’s plan to administer jabs to all adults, with fewer then half of India’s states able to begin vaccinating over-18s amid warnings the shortfall could last months.
Over the weekend, more than 600 million Indians became eligible for the coronavirus vaccine in a policy that was introduced in the wake of a deadly second wave hitting the country last month.
Continue reading...Our South Asia correspondent reflects on a catastrophe that is now affecting the lives of almost everyone in the country
You recently lost a close colleague, Kakoli Bhattacharya, to Covid-19. Can you tell us about her and the important work that she did?
Kakoli was the Guardian’s news assistant over here and had worked for us since 2009. She could find any number or contact I needed and smoothed over any and all of the bureaucratic challenges that working in India can present. She made reporting here a huge joy, when it could be a huge challenge, and she was hugely well thought of by journalists for other organisations too. More than that, though, she was the person who welcomed me to Delhi. She knew the region inside out. She was incredibly warm and was someone I could always call on. The Guardian’s India coverage won’t be the same without her.
Related: ‘Warm, kind, wise and brilliant’: Guardian writers remember Kakoli Bhattacharya
Continue reading...Prime minister defeated in West Bengal as voters send message over handling of coronavirus crisis
India’s prime minister has suffered a rare political defeat in a key state election, amid signs of a voter backlash over his handling of the coronavirus disaster as the country reported a record number of deaths.
Narendra Modi had been expected to make significant gains on Sunday in West Bengal, one of few states where his rightwing Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) does not have a parliamentary majority. Instead, Mamata Banerjee, a powerful regional politician and prominent Modi critic, won a third term as chief minister.
Continue reading...Dr Chahat Verma saw five patients die in a day as India’s Covid crisis overwhelms hospitals
During the past week, when oxygen was periodically running out at Ganga Ram hospital, one thing Dr Chahat Verma found unbearable was the look on the faces of patients when the oxygen saturation levels of another patient in the ward plunged.
“They’d lie there, watching the patient gasping, unable to breathe, and they knew we weren’t giving oxygen because there wasn’t any. The look in their eyes was one of pure terror. They knew it could be their turn next,” she said.
Continue reading...Focus on vaccines and tests has been obscuring the need for oxygen in low- and middle-income countries
The scenes in India of families desperately searching for oxygen for critically ill Covid patients will be repeated in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and other countries in Africa and around the world unless a significant international effort is made to ensure all countries have good oxygen supplies, campaigners have said.
The focus on vaccines and tests, while important, has been obscuring the need for oxygen, which is cheap and readily available in high-income countries but in short supply elsewhere, they say. Before India, there was similarly shocking footage from Manaus in Brazil where distressed relatives pleaded for oxygen to keep a family member alive.
Continue reading...Latin America and Africa face new wave as politicians and scientists urge rescue packages
World leaders have been warned that unless they act with extreme urgency, the Covid-19 pandemic will overwhelm health services in many nations in South America, Asia, and Africa over the next few weeks.
Only billions of pounds of aid and massive exports of vaccines can halt a humanitarian catastrophe that is now unfolding rapidly across the planet, scientists and world health experts said.
Continue reading...Lawyers and academics say ban an ‘extraordinary precedent’ that could be open to multiple challenges
The travel ban preventing Australians in India from returning home could be subject to legal challenges, with lawyers and academics believing the extraordinary measure may breach the law.
Scott Morrison’s government has been condemned for its “outrageous” decision to introduce fines of up to $66,600 or five years in prison, or both, for anyone defying a travel ban preventing Australians returning home from India.
Continue reading...RamKaran Mishra is a Hindu priest who performs the last rites at the Ghazipur crematorium in east Delhi, on the frontline of India's Covid crisis. He's been cremating up to 150 bodies day after day, working long hours into the night. With no end in sight, and feeling abandoned by his government, Mishra must deal with traumatised families and an ever-present smell of burning bodies
Country’s government failed to impose extra restrictions despite warnings of a new, more dangerous strain in early March, experts claim
A panel of Indian scientists warned officials in early March of a new and more contagious variant of the coronavirus taking hold in the country, it has emerged.
Despite the warning, four of the scientists said the federal government did not seek to impose major restrictions to stop the spread of the virus, Reuters reported on Saturday. Millions of largely unmasked people attended religious festivals and political rallies that were held by prime minister Narendra Modi, leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party and opposition politicians.
Continue reading...Leading UK expert says loss of funding certain to damage attempts to tackle virus and variants
Vital coronavirus research, including a project tracking variants in India, has had its funding reduced by up to 70% under swingeing cuts to the UK overseas aid budget.
One of Britain’s leading infectious disease experts said the UK government cuts were certain to damage attempts to tackle the virus and track new variants.
Continue reading...‘Situation is out of control’ as cases spike and hospitals run short of beds and oxygen
Doctors in Nepal have warned that the country is facing a similar devastating wave of Covid-19 as neighbouring India, with border districts already reporting an alarming spike in cases and shortage of hospital beds and oxygen.
In the Banke district of Nepal, bordering India, doctors at Bheri hospital said it was turning into a “mini India”, with coronavirus spreading out of control.
Continue reading...As bodies pile up at the Ghazipur crematorium, staff and relatives turn their ire on the Modi government
The bodies came, one after another, after another, after another. So many bodies that the ambulances and trucks carrying them into the crematorium blocked traffic.
In Delhi, a city where someone dies from Covid-19 every four minutes, every day is a battle not just for hospital beds but for a space to say goodbye to the dead with dignity.
Continue reading...