New Delhi: As India battles a devastating second wave of the coronavirus pandemic amid a shortage of oxygen, beds and other resources, AIIMS chief Dr. Randeep Guleria suggested that areas with high positivity rate — 10% to be specific must be locked down. “We need to look at areas with high infectivity (positivity) rates… if it is high then we need to have containment zones, even lockdown, so the chain of transmission is broken and the number of cases falls,” he said while speaking to NDTV yesterday.
Reacting to the worsening situation, Guleria said that the healthcare system is paying the price for the rise in infections. “We need to break the chain of transmission so that number of cases falls. We cannot continue to have such a large number of active cases”, the portal quoted the AIIMS chief as saying.
Notably, India has been reporting over 3 lakh COVID cases for the last few days. Earlier on Saturday, India saw more than 3.46 lakh fresh infections and 2,624 fatalities, the highest single-day spike the country recorded ever since the pandemic began last year.
Situation Turning Grim
The situation is turning grim as many hospitals in the national capital continued to grapple with oxygen scarcity and some have now asked families of patients to shift them to other facilities.
30 patients died in two hospitals in Delhi and Amritsar which complained of oxygen shortage while officials at many other health facilities said they were struggling to meet the oxygen needs of the patients and appealed to the governments for help.
While 25 patients died at Delhi’s Jaipur Golden Hospital, five people lost their lives at a private hospital in Amritsar allegedly due to a shortage of oxygen.
“It’s a Tsunami, Not a Wave”
The Delhi High Court asked the Centre about the preparedness to deal with the expected COVID-19 second wave peak in mid-May, terming the mounting cases as a ‘tsunami’, and also warned it will “hang” any person who tries to obstruct oxygen supplies to hospitals here.
Talking tough, a bench of Justices Vipin Sanghi and Rekha Palli said this during a special three-hour-long hearing on a holiday on the issue of escalating oxygen crisis in various hospitals in Delhi.
“We will not spare anyone,” the bench said.