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Relatives help Jagdish Singh, 57, out of an ambulance outside a government-run hospital to receive treatment in Bijnor district, Uttar Pradesh, India, May 11, 2021. /Reuters
India's coronavirus death toll crossed 250,000 on Wednesday in the deadliest 24 hours since the pandemic began, as the disease rampaged through the countryside.
Daily infections are shooting up in the Indian countryside in comparison to big towns, where they have slowed after last month's surge, experts say.
More than half the cases this week in the western state of Maharashtra were in rural areas, up from a third a month ago. That share is nearly two-thirds in the most populous, and mainly rural, state of Uttar Pradesh, government data showed.
A pregnant woman was taking care of her husband who had breathing difficulties in a hospital in Bhagalpur in the eastern state of Bihar, which is seeing a case surge its health system could barely have handled at the best of times.
"There is no doctor here, she sleeps the whole night here, taking care of her husband," the woman's brother told India Today television.
People wearing protective face masks wait to receive their second dose of COVID-19 vaccine outside a vaccination center in Kolkata, India, May 12, 2021. /Reuters
The second wave erupted in February, inundating hospitals and medical staff, as well as crematoriums and mortuaries.
Experts still cannot say for sure when numbers will peak and concern is growing about the transmissibility of the variant that is driving infections in India and spreading worldwide.
Indian state leaders have clamored for vaccines to stop the second wave and the devastation it has wrought, urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to stop exporting doses, ramp up production and help procure urgent supplies from overseas.
"People will die in the same way in the third and fourth waves as they have this time" without more vaccines, said Delhi's Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia.
Medical workers listen to a doctor during their briefing at the site of a temporary COVID-19 care facility, at Ramlila Ground, in New Delhi, India, May 12, 2021. /Reuters
Lacking beds, drugs and oxygen, many hospitals in the world's second-most populous country have been forced to turn away droves of sufferers.
"We seem to be plateauing around 400,000 cases a day," the Indian Express newspaper quoted virologist Shahid Jameel as saying. "It is still too early to say whether we have reached the peak."
The country accounts for half of COVID-19 cases and 30 percent of deaths worldwide, the World Health Organization said.
Adding that the variant behind India's surging cases has been reported in nearly 50 countries, the global health agency has designated the B.1.617 variant found there of global concern but said its full impact is not yet clear.
(With input from Reuters)
