Of the 10 districts with the lowest vaccination coverage in India, six are from Uttar Pradesh, shows an analysis of official data from the government’s Cowin platform by Scroll.in.
India’s second wave of Covid-19 has been marked by a grave oxygen crisis. More than 500 patients have died just in hospitals because of a shortage of the life-saving gas. Some of these deaths could have been prevented had the country vaccinated its people at a faster clip, data suggests.
She was 53. The family could not find her a bed in any of the hospitals in Delhi where they lived when her oxygen levels plunged on April 26. The next day, they found her one in a private hospital in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh’s Greater Noida. But the hospital had an oxygen shortage—as most facilities in north India at the time.
In the past five days, 25 flights loaded with 300 tonnes of emergency Covid-19 relief supplies have landed in India’s capital from around the world. The supplies include 5,500 oxygen concentrators, 3,200 oxygen cylinders and 1,36,000 remdesivir injections, said a spokesperson of the Delhi International Airport Limited.
On the evening of April 23, Dhanraj Singh, a 40-year blind man, arrived at the Sikanderpur community health centre in eastern Uttar Pradesh’s Ballia district, complaining of breathlessness. Singh, a resident of the nearby Bansi Bazar village, was running a temperature too. According to the doctor who attended to him, Singh collapsed within “hardly five-seven minutes”. The body was handed over to the family.
Vinay Srivastava’s oxygen saturation level was dangerously low when he tweeted around 8 pm on April 16 to say that no hospital in Lucknow was responding to his phone calls.
India is currently in its third phase of Covid-19 vaccination where those above 45 years are eligible to get the shots. Public and private hospitals have administered over 80 million doses with most of them accounting for the first dose.
The white hatchback slowed down as it approached the toll plaza. At the wheels was a middle-aged Sikh man and in the passenger seat an old woman with flowing grey hair. Seated behind were three more women, one middle-aged and the other two much younger, who looked barely out of their teens.
Uddipana Goswami, a 27-year-old Hyderabad-based corporate professional, is not quite holding her breath for a Covid-19 vaccine. “I trust our scientists and their work, but not politically driven statements,” said Goswami.
If there is a Covid-19 surge, can a lockdown be far behind?
Jayaprakash Muliyil is one of India’s foremost epidemiologists, with decades of experience in the study of infectious diseases. The former principal of the Christian Medical College in Vellore spoke to Scroll.in about India’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.
At 10 am on Saturday, two days after a suicide bomber tore into a convoy of the Central Reserve Police Force in Kashmir, killing 41 soldiers, a group called “Clean the Nation” was created on Facebook by a man named Madhur Zucc Singh.
