A local administrator in western India said on Wednesday that 22 patients died in a hospital when their oxygen supply was interrupted by leakage in a supply tank.
Suraj Mandhar, the district collector, said the oxygen supply has since been resumed to other patients.
Fire officer Sanjay Bairagi said the leakage was plugged by the fire service within 15 minutes, but there was supply disruption in the Zakir Hussain Hospital in Nashik, a city in Maharashtra state that is the worst-hit by the latest surge in coronavirus cases in the country.
Television images showed white fumes spreading in the hospital area, causing panic.More than 170 patients were on oxygen in the hospital, according to local media.
Country's Covid surge hits new record
Meanwhile, India's brutal new Covid outbreak set records on Wednesday with more than 2,000 deaths in 24 hours as hospitals in New Delhi ran perilously low on oxygen.
India has been in the grips of a second wave of infections blamed on lax government rules and a new “double mutant” virus variant, adding almost 3.5 million new cases this month alone.
Health ministry data on Wednesday showed a record 2,023 fatalities and 295,000 new cases in 24 hours, among the world's biggest daily case totals and on a par with numbers seen in the United States during a deadly surge in January.
In an address to the nation on Tuesday night, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the country of 1.3 billion people was “once again fighting a big fight”.
“The situation was under control till a few weeks back, and then this second corona wave came like a storm,” he said.Officially, almost 180,000 Indians have died from coronavirus, 15,000 of them this month, although some believe the real number may be higher.
Social media and newspaper reports have been flooded with horrifying images of row upon row of burning pyres and crematoriums unable to cope.
In Ghaziabad outside Delhi, television pictures showed bodies wrapped in shrouds lined up on biers on the pavement with weeping relatives waiting for their slot.
In the western state of Gujarat, many crematoriums in Surat, Rajkot, Jamnagar and Ahmedabad are operating around the clock with three to four times more bodies than normal.
The chimney of one electric furnace in Ahmedabad cracked and collapsed after being in constant use for up to 20 hours every day for the past two weeks.
The iron frames inside another in the industrial diamond hub of Surat melted because there was no time to let the furnaces cool.
“Until last month we were cremating 20-odd bodies per day [...] But since the beginning of April we have been handling over 80 bodies every day,” said a local official at the Ramnath Ghela Crematorium in the city.
With waiting times of up to eight hours, Rajkot has set up a dedicated 24/7 control room to manage the flow in the city's four crematoriums.
Bring your own wood
At two crematoriums in Lucknow in the north, relatives are being given numbered tokens and made to wait for up to 12 hours. One has started burning bodies in an adjacent park, an official told AFP.
Rohit Singh, whose father died from Covid-19, said crematorium officials were charging around 7,000 rupees ($100) — almost 20 times the normal rate.
Some crematoriums in Lucknow ran out of wood and asked people to bring it themselves. Viral photos on social media showed electric rickshaws laden down with logs.
The ultimate place for Hindus to be cremated is Varanasi, the ancient city where since time immemorial bodies have been burned on the banks of the river Ganges.
Belbhadra, who works at one of the famous ghats there, told AFP that they were cremating at least 200 suspected coronavirus victims per day.
The usual time to get to the ghat — a riverside embankment for cremations — from the main road via narrow lanes was usually three or four minutes, a resident said.
“Now it takes around 20 minutes. that's how crowded the lanes are with people waiting to cremate the dead,” he said.
