‘No place for you’: Indian hospitals buckle amid virus surge
NEW DELHI — Seema Gandotra, sick with the coronavirus, gasped for breath in an ambulance for 10 hours as it tried unsuccessfully to find an open bed at six hospitals in India’s sprawling capital. By the time she was admitted, it was too late, and the 51-year-old died hours later.
Rajiv Tiwari, whose oxygen levels began falling after he tested positive for the virus, has the opposite problem: He identified an open bed, but the resident of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh can’t get to it. “There is no ambulance to take me to the hospital,” he said.
Such tragedies are familiar from surges in other parts of the world — but were largely unknown in India, which was able to prevent a collapse in its health system last year through a harsh lockdown. But now they are everyday occurrences in the vast country, which is seeing its largest surge of the pandemic so far and watching its chronically underfunded health system crumble.
Tests are delayed. Medical oxygen is scarce. Hospitals are understaffed and overflowing. Intensive care units are full. Nearly all ventilators are in use, and the dead are piling up at crematoriums and graveyards. India recorded over 250,000 new infections and over 1,700 deaths in the past 24 hours alone, and the U.K. announced a travel ban on most visitors from the country this week. Overall, India has reported more than 15 million cases and some 180,000 deaths — and experts say these numbers are likely undercounted.
“The surge in infections has come like a storm and a big battle lies ahead,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in an address to the nation Tuesday night.
Sikh Coalition group wants probe of gunman’s possible supremacist link
INDIANAPOLIS — A Sikh civil rights organization called on law enforcement Tuesday to investigate whether a former FedEx employee who fatally shot eight people — four of them Sikhs — at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis last week had any ties to hate groups.
The Sikh Coalition’s request came a day after Indianapolis police released a report from last year stating that an officer who seized a shotgun from Brandon Scott Hole’s home after his arrest in March 2020 saw what he identified as white supremacist websites on Hole’s computer.
The coalition, which identifies itself as the largest Sikh civil rights organization in the U.S., said it has sent letters to law enforcement and state and federal lawmakers “clearly expressing the continuing and urgent need to investigate the possibility of a bias motivation” in last Thursday’s mass shooting.
Hole was arrested last year at his family’s home after his mother told police her son might commit “suicide by cop.” A prosecutor said Monday that after his arrest, Hole never appeared before a judge under Indiana’s “red flag” law, which allows police or courts to seize guns from people who show warning signs of violence.
Hole, 19, used two rifles to kill eight FedEx workers and wound several others inside and outside the facility and then fatally shot himself before police entered the building, authorities have said.
Brazil COVID cases still soaring among unprotected majority
SAO PAULO — Brazil’s slowly unfolding vaccination program appears to have slowed the pace of deaths among the nation’s elderly, according to death certificate data, but COVID-19 is still taking a rising toll as unprotected younger people get sick.
People 80 and over accounted for a quarter of the nation’s COVID-19 deaths in February, but less than a fifth in March, according to data provided to The Associated Press on Tuesday by Arpen-Brasil, an association which represents thousands of the notaries who record death certificates in Brazil.
But relatively few beyond the elderly have been protected: Less than 9 million of Brazil’s 210 million residents have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to Our World in Data, an online research site.
Confirmed new infections from the virus among all age groups jumped about 70 percent between December and March: Reported cases rose from 1.3 million in December to 1.5 million in January, to 1.36 million in February and to 2.25 million in March.
But among people aged 20 to 59 the death toll tripled from February to March, hitting 23,366, according to the notaries.
From wire sources