India tries to meet need for oxygen supplies amid record new cases, deaths
With hospitals in India pleading with the government on social media to replenish their oxygen supplies and threatening to stop fresh admissions of patients, the government put oxygen tankers on special express trains to save COVID-19 patients who are struggling to breathe.
“We have ramped up the production as oxygen consumption is rising through the roof," said Saket Tiku, president of the All India Industrial Gases Manufacturers Association. "But we have limitations and the biggest challenge right now is transporting it to where it's urgently needed. ”
India is seeing the world’s worst coronavirus surge, setting a grim record for daily infections for a second straight day with 332,730. India has confirmed 16 million cases so far and recorded 2,263 deaths in the past 24 hours.
Adding to the deaths, a fire in Mumbai, India, killed 13 COVID-19 patients early Friday when an air conditioning unit exploded in a hospital's ICU.
As rich countries buy excess vaccine doses, poor countries struggle to vaccinate, study shows
The world’s richest countries have collectively bought 1 billion more doses than their citizens need, according to a study by the global advocacy group ONE. The rest of the world has only been able to secure 2.5 billion doses — not enough to vaccinate their populations.
Some are calling on the U.S. to share doses with other countries, like India, which reported a global one-day record of more than 332,700 new infections Friday as a coronavirus surge in the world’s second-most populous country overwhelms a fragile health care system critically short of hospital beds and oxygen.
Send an email
