NEW DELHI – India hit a grim milestone in the coronavirus pandemic on Friday, killing 2 million people as community health volunteers complained they were not properly equipped to to respond to the wave of infections in rural areas.
Even though India, the second most popular country in the world, has maintained relatively low mortality rates, the incidence of the disease varies widely across the country, with the recent shift from cities to rural areas, where health care resources are available. .
The Ministry of Public Health reported 62,538 cases in the past 24 hours, increasing the nation’s total to 2,027,074 – with more than 41,000 people dying from COVID-19 so far.
India has the third-highest coronavirus property tax in the world after the United States and Brazil, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Falls in India have risen rapidly since the government began lifting a social lockdown, hoping to jump a moribund economy. India projects negative economic growth by 2020.
Although life began to cautiously take to the streets of the capital, New Delhi, and financial hub Mumbai, which seem to have passed their peaks, authorities somewhere in India were once again trapped after sharp spikes in cases. Including in Uttar Pradesh, a state of 220 million where infections in every district weigh heavily on the fragile health system.
After being completely reopened in June, the state introduced a closure of the weekend in July.
Shachindra Sharma, a 60-year-old graphic designer in the state capital, Lucknow, leaves his home only for a weekly grocery store.
“I’m not afraid of the disease, but I’m afraid of the government system that has collapsed,” he said.
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About 900,000 members of a community’s entire female health force went on a two-day strike on Friday, protesting that they were drawn in to help with contact tracing and in quarantine centers, but were not given adequate personal protective equipment or extra pay, according to organizer AR Sindhu.
The health workers, known as Accredited Social Health Activists, or ASHA, which means “hope” in several Indian languages, have been deployed in villages on behalf of the Ministry of Public Health.
“ASHA workers do not have masks or PPEs or even sanitizers,” Sindhu said.
Manisha Verma, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Public Health, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
India has launched two of the tens of thousands and a half prospective vaccines in human trials, with vaccine maker Zydus Cadila announcing that it has completed Phase 1 trials of its DNA-based vaccine on Thursday.
The country will be vital to global vaccination efforts, despite its own efforts to work.
The world’s largest vaccine maker, the Serum Institute in the central Indian city of Pune, has the capacity to produce up to a billion doses in development by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford – where researchers hope to launch a vaccine for emergency use by October.
