17th June 2020
India records 2,000 coronavirus deaths in a DAY
By Daily Mail
Daily Mail - India's official coronavirus death toll leapt by more than 2,000 to reach 11,903 on Wednesday as Germany advised its nationals to consider leaving the country because of growing health risks.
Mumbai revised its toll up by 862 to 3,165 because of unspecified accounting 'discrepancies' while New Delhi saw a record jump of more than 400 deaths, taking its total to more than 1,800.
It was not immediately clear how many of the deaths had occurred in the past 24 hours and how many were from adjustments over a longer period.
The pandemic has badly hit India's densely populated major cities and Chennai ordered a new lockdown from Friday because of a surge in cases that will last until the end of June.
Elsewhere, lockdowns are gradually being eased because of the damage they have caused the economy.
India, the fourth-worst-hit country in the world by cases, has now recorded 354,065 cases, according to official figures.
Experts say the figure is much higher and have called for more widespread testing.
With hospitals in several cities now struggling to keep up with the pandemic, Germany became the first country to warn its nationals about staying in the country.
The German foreign ministry sent a message to nationals in India saying it 'recommends that you and your families seriously consider whether a temporary return to Germany or another country with an assured health care system makes sense'.
The note said that while the lockdown was being eased 'unlike in Europe, case numbers are still rising strongly. This increases considerably the risk of infection.'
The embassy said its medical experts believed that people with the coronavirus and other serious medical needs have 'no or very little chance of being admitted to hospitals. This increases considerably the health risks of a stay in India.'
Hospitals in Mumbai have been overwhelmed by coronavirus cases, while the government has sent specially adapted railway carriages to Delhi and authorities have taken over hotels and banquet halls to put coronavirus patients.
Some hospitals have even had to store bodies in hospital lobbies.
Critics have been saying the country did too little to prepare and reopened shopping malls and temples too soon.
Some families of people infected with COVID-19 have complained about having to hunt for beds for their relatives after hospitals turned them away.
Others said patients had been left unattended in corridors of government-run hospitals, while local media reports of dead bodies in a hospital lobby prompted the Supreme Court to order the state administration to get its act together.
'I don't think we expected that cases would rise this much,' said a lawmaker of the Aam Aadmi party that runs the capital, who asked not to be named. 'We were so over-confident.'
The office of New Delhi's Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and the city's health authorities did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
In a novel way to create beds for coronavirus patients, India has been transforming out-of-action trains into Covid-19 care centres.
At the start of the pandemic, Indian Railways pledged to convert as many as 20,000 train carriages into isolation wards, fitted with curtained-off beds, a nurses' station, doctor's cabin and space for medical supplies.
As many as 5,231 coaches have so far been converted into Covid-19 care centres, according to Railway Board Chairman Vinod Kumar Yadav.
Cases in the capital are set to surge. The government estimates it will have 550,000 COVID-19 cases by the end of July, around 13 times current numbers, and will require 150,000 beds by then.
On Monday a government mobile app showed that of Delhi's 9,940 COVID-19 beds, almost 5,500 were occupied. Of the 108 private and public hospitals listed in the app, 25 had no beds available.
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