COVID-19: India reports 379,257 new cases and 3,645 deaths

India: India's total COVID-19 cases passed 18 million on Thursday after a daily world record infestation and because the government rejected reports of problems with its vaccination campaign.

India reported 379,257 new COVID-19 cases and 3,645 new deaths on Thursday, according to health ministry data. This was the highest number of deaths reported in a single day in India since the onset of the pandemic.

India's best hope of curbing its second deadly wave of COVID-19 was to vaccinate its large population, experts said, and on Wednesday it opened registrations for anyone over the age of 18 who got jabs from Saturday.

But the country, which is one of the largest in the world vaccine producers, do not have the stock for the estimated 600 million people who would be eligible.

Many people who tried to sign up said that they failed, and complained on social media that they could not get a registration, or that they simply could not register online as the site repeatedly crashed.

"Statistics indicate that the system is operating far from an accident or slow performance, without any errors," the government said in a statement late Wednesday.

The government said more than 8 million people had registered for the vaccinations, but it was not immediately clear how many were getting slots.

About 9% of India's population has received one dose since the January vaccination campaign began with health workers and then the elderly.

The second wave of infections overwhelmed hospitals and crematoria and led to an increasingly urgent response from allies sending overseas equipment.

"The COVID outbreak in India is a humanitarian crisis," US Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/1387501384367476736

"I'm writing a letter to @moderna_tx, @pfizer and @jnjnews to find out what steps they are taking to expand global access to their vaccines to save lives and prevent variants from spreading around the world."

Two planes from Russia with 20 oxygen concentrators, 75 fans, 150 bed monitors and medicines totalling 22 tons arrived in the capital Delhi on Thursday.

The United States sends supplies worth more than $100 million to India, including 1,000 oxygen cylinders, 15 million N95 masks and 1 million rapid diagnostic tests, the White House said in a statement on Wednesday.

The United States also has its own order of AstraZeneca from manufactures supplies to redirect to India, which will allow the production of more than 20 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, according to the White House.

India will receive on May 1, the first series of Russian Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19. The Russian RDIF Sovereign Wealth Fund, which markets Sputnik V worldwide, has already signed agreements with five leading Indian manufacturers for more than 850 million doses of the vaccine a year.

Delhi reports one death every four minutes to COVID-19 and ambulances take the bodies of COVID-19 victims to makeshift crematorium facilities in parks and parking lots, where corpses burn on rows and rows of funeral vines.

ON WEDNESDAY, the US State Department issued a travel advisory warning against travel to India due to the pandemic. It approved the voluntary departure of relatives of US government employees in India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been criticized for allowing massive political rallies and religious festivals that have been a ubiquitous event in recent weeks.

More than 8.4 million voters will vote on Thursday in the final phase of an eight-vote election in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, even though the state is witnessing a record increase in coronavirus cases.

"The people of this country are entitled to a complete and honest report of what led to more than a billion people in a disaster," said Vikram Patel, the Pershing Square professor of global health in the Department of Global Health and Social Affairs medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The head of South Asia of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Udaya Regmi, told the world was entering a critical phase of the pandemic and had to have it vaccinations available to all adults as soon as possible. Early modelling showed that the B.1.617 variant of the virus detected in India had a higher growth rate than other varieties in the country, indicating increased portability, he said.

The World Health Organization said in its weekly magazine epidemiological update that India accounted for 38% of the 5.7 million cases reported on it worldwide last week.