(CN) --- The pandemic is entering a new deadly phase as India, the world's second most populous nation with nearly 1.3 billion people, suffers a catastrophic rise in novel coronavirus infections and deaths.
On Thursday and Friday, India recorded the two highest daily tallies of coronavirus cases yet for any nation since the pandemic started, raising the specter that a catastrophic wave of death will follow as the virus spreads through India’s densely populated cities, towns and countryside.
A new record was set on Friday with 332,730 new cases. Deaths too are spiking with 2,102 new fatalities reported on Thursday and 2,256 on Friday. No other country has reported such a dramatic explosion of infections in such a short amount of time. A month ago, when the surge started, India was reporting on average about 42,000 new daily infections and about 200 daily deaths.
New Delhi, India’s capital city of more than 20 million people, and Mumbai, the capital of the state of Maharashtra with more than 12 million people, are two of the hardest-hit places with hospitals running out of oxygen for ventilators and crematoriums unable to keep up.
A fire at a hospital near Mumbai, apparently caused when an air-conditioning unit malfunctioned, killed at least 13 Covid-19 patients on Friday. On Wednesday, at least 22 patients died at a hospital in the city of Nashik in Maharashtra after a leak cut off their oxygen supplies.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants also have fled the disease-ravaged cities, leading to fears that the virus will spread through rural India.
“The situation in India is a devastating reminder of what this virus can do and why we must marshal every tool against it in a comprehensive and integrated approach: public health measures, vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, during a news briefing at the agency's Geneva headquarters on Friday.
French President Emmanuel Macron, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and other political leaders delivered recorded speeches at the news briefing and appealed for more global cooperation in combating the pandemic.
One year ago, Macron and Ramaphosa helped set up the ACT-Accelerator, a global initiative overseen by the WHO to ship medical gear and resources, including drugs, oxygen and vaccines, to all parts of the world to combat the pandemic. From out of that idea, the WHO spawned Covax, a global vaccine distribution drive.
But a year later, those initiatives have had mixed results with vaccine distribution to poorer countries still only barely begun and the WHO consistently pleading for more money throughout the year. On Friday, the agency said the ACT-Accelerator had a funding gap of $19 billion.
The rapid and devastating outbreak in India – where a more contagious strain of the coronavirus was discovered last year and is partly blamed for driving India’s outbreak – is an alarming development and comes as Brazil and much of Latin America continue to endure an unrelenting wave of disease.
Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO chief of emergencies, said during the news briefing that the outbreak in India will be difficult to contain because lockdowns and restricting contact between people are hard to achieve in a country with such high population density.
“It is a very difficult task both to reduce the force of infection by having people adapt a behavior not always easy in situations that people find themselves in India,” Ryan said.
Besides being the second most populous country in the world after China, it is also one of the poorest and its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been blamed for not imposing lockdowns and other restrictions. Modi, who leads a Hindu nationalist party, is often compared to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, another deeply conservative leader who is blamed for his country’s catastrophic outbreak.
