NEW DELHI: India crossed a grim milestone Wednesday of 200,000 people lost to the coronavirus as a devastating surge of new infections tears through dense cities and rural areas alike and overwhelms health care systems on the brink of collapse.
The health ministry reported a single-day record 3,293 COVID-19 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing India’s total fatalities to 201,187, as the world’s second most populous country endures its darkest chapter of the pandemic yet.
The country also reported 362,757 new infections, a new global record, which raised the overall total past 17.9 million. The previous high of 350,000 on Monday had capped a five-day streak of recording the largest single-day increases in any country throughout the pandemic.
India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the fourth to cross 200,000 deaths, behind the United States, Brazil and Mexico. And as in many nations, experts believe the coronavirus infections and fatalities in India are severe undercounts.
The first known COVID-19 death in India happened on March 12, 2020, in southern Karnataka state. It took five months to reach the first 50,000 dead. The toll hit 100,000 deaths in the next two months in October 2020 and 150,000 three months later in January this year. Deaths slowed until mid-March, only to sharply rise again.
For the past week, more than 2,000 Indians have died every day.
India thought it had weathered the worst of the pandemic last year, but the virus is now racing through its population and systems are beginning to collapse.
Hospitalizations and deaths have reached record highs, overwhelming health care workers. Patients are suffocating because hospitals’ oxygen supplies have run out. Desperate family members are sending SOS messages on social media, hoping someone would help them find oxygen cylinders, empty hospital beds and critical drugs for their loved ones. Crematoriums have spilled over into parking lots, lighting up night skies in some cities.
With its health care system sinking fast, India is now looking at other nations to pull it out of the record surge that is barreling through one state and then another.
Many countries have offered assistance, including the US, which has promised to help with personal protective equipment, tests and oxygen supplies. The US will also send raw materials for vaccine production, strengthening India’s capacity to manufacture more AstraZeneca doses.
Health experts say huge gatherings during Hindu festivals and mammoth election rallies in some states have accelerated the unprecedented surge India is seeing now.
They also say the government’s mixed messaging and its premature declarations of victory over the virus encouraged people to relax when they should have continued strict adherence to physical distancing, wearing masks and avoiding large crowds.
The national capital New Delhi is in lockdown, as are the southern states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Some other states, too, have enforced restrictions in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus.
India has also called on its armed forces to help fight the devastating crisis. India’s chief of Defense Staff, General Bipin Rawat, said late Monday that oxygen supplies would be released from armed forces reserves and its retired medical personnel would join health facilities to ease the pressure on doctors.
Meanwhile, India’s vaccination program appears to be struggling. So far nearly 10 percent of the country’s population have received one jab, but just over 1.5 percent have received both vaccines.
Indians 18 and older will be eligible for a vaccine from Saturday.
Meanwhile, the loss of lives is accelerating.
Radha Gobindo Pramanik is among the countless Indians who lost a family member to the virus. His daughter, Navanita Paramanik Rajput, died on April 18.
At first, Rajput complained of colds and fever. But when the 37-year-old’s oxygen levels started to drop, her father and husband decided to take her to a government hospital.
Pramanik said she came out of the ambulance smiling but by the time her husband finished filling the hospital registration form, her daughter was gasping for breath.
“Before I could understand anything, she collapsed in the arms of her husband,” Pramanik said, sobbing.
India tops 200,000 dead as coronavirus surge breaks health system
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India tops 200,000 dead as coronavirus surge breaks health system
- India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, is the fourth to cross 200,000 deaths, behind the United States, Brazil and Mexico
Daesh claims responsibility for killing Chinese national in Afghanistan
- Daesh said it had targeted a vehicle carrying the Chinese citizen, which led to his death and damage to his vehicle
- China said it was “deeply shocked” by the attack and demanded the Afghan side thoroughly investigate the incident
KABUL: Daesh (Islamic State) has claimed responsibility for the killing of a Chinese national in Afghanistan’s northern Takhar province, it said in a post on its Telegram channel late on Wednesday.
Afghan police in the province had said on Wednesday that a Chinese citizen was murdered and a preliminary investigation had been launched, but it was not clear who was behind the attack.
Daesh said it had targeted a vehicle carrying the Chinese citizen, which led to his death and damage to his vehicle.
China’s foreign ministry said on Thursday it was “deeply shocked” by the attack and had demanded that the Afghan side thoroughly investigate the incident and severely punish the perpetrators.
“We urge the Afghan interim government to take resolute and effective measures to ensure the security of Chinese civil institutions and projects in Afghanistan,” ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a regular press briefing.
China was the first country to appoint an ambassador to Afghanistan under the Taliban and has said it wants to boost trade and investment ties.
The Taliban took over in 2021, vowing to restore security to the war-torn nation.
Attacks have continued, including an assault in 2022 on a Kabul hotel popular with Chinese investors. Daesh has claimed responsibility for many of them.
NATO allies must pay ‘fair share’ before adding members: US envoy
- NATO allies must pay their “fair share” on defense before considering enlarging the alliance, a US presidential envoy said Thursday, as NATO’s chief said members will need to ramp up defense spending
DAVOS: NATO allies must pay their “fair share” on defense before considering enlarging the alliance, a US presidential envoy said Thursday, as NATO’s chief said members will need to ramp up defense spending.
“You cannot ask the American people to expand the umbrella of NATO when the current members aren’t paying their fair share, and that includes the Dutch who need to step up,” US envoy Richard Grenell said by video link at an event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in response to NATO chief Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister.
“We have collectively to move up and we will decide on the exact number later this year, but it will be considerably more than two (percent),” Rutte said, referring to the alliance’s target of defense spending of two percent of GDP.
Balkan air pollution crisis threatens public health, EU membership goals
- Old coal plants, cars keep Balkan pollution high
- Economic hardship hinders progress toward reducing emissions
OBILIC: For 30 years, Shemsi Gara operated a giant digger in a Kosovo coal mine, churning up toxic dust that covered his face and got into his airways. Home life wasn’t much better: the power plants that the mine supplies constantly spew fumes over his village.
Gara died on Sunday aged 55 after three years of treatment failed to contain his lung cancer. In his final days, unable to walk, he lay on a couch at home, gaunt and in pain, as a machine pumped oxygen into his dying body.
“I kept telling him I wanted to help, but I couldn’t,” said his wife Xhejlane, who mourned in her living room with friends on Wednesday. “He would say ‘Only God knows the pain I have’.”
As much of the world moves to reduce the use of fossil fuels, pollution in Western Balkan countries remains stubbornly high due to household heating, outdated coal plants, old cars, and a lack of money to tackle the problem.
Relatively small cities such as Serbia’s capital Belgrade and Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo have frequently topped daily global pollution charts, according to websites that track air quality worldwide.
This has costly health impacts, and could also jeopardize such countries’ prospects of joining the European Union, which has stricter emissions standards.
“There are no resources in the region for the reduction of air pollution,” said Mirko Popovic, a director with the Renewables and Environmental Regulatory Institute think-tank in Belgrade.
In the EU, net greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by about 40 percent since 1990, driven by the embrace of renewable energy, a European Commission report said in November.
Western Balkan nations have pledged to reduce carbon emissions but economic hardship has slowed progress.
Kosovo, one of Europe’s poorest countries, generates more than 90 percent of its power from coal. The World Bank estimates that a transition to a coal-free economy will cost 4.5 billion euros.
SMOG
The impact of pollution is clear across the region, especially in winter.
Smog has cloaked Belgrade this week, while Sarajevo sits in a valley that acts as a pollution trap. The Bosnian capital’s air quality was classed as “hazardous” on Tuesday, the worst in the world, according to IQAir, which tracks pollution levels.
In North Macedonia’s capital Skopje, mask-wearing locals often lose sight of nearby snow-capped mountains for days.
The rate of deaths attributable to ambient pollution is relatively high — 114 per 100,000 people in Bosnia and around 100 in Serbia and Montenegro, World Health Organization data show, compared with just 45 in Germany and 29 in France.
Gara was buried on Monday in a cemetery in Obilic, outside Kosovo’s capital Pristina. From the graveside, mourners could hear the chug of a nearby conveyor belt transporting coal from the mine to the power plants.
Gara’s doctor, Haki Jashari, blamed Gara’s cancer on his years at the coal mine, and on the polluting power plants.
Cancer rates more than doubled in Obilic over the last two years, Jashari said — the result, he added, of a generation of exposure to pollutants. He expects it will get worse.
Kosovo’s energy ministry told Reuters it was committed to reducing emissions and was investing in renewable energy projects and upgrading existing plants.
Jashari only wishes more could have been done sooner.
“They would have shut the plants down if we were part of the EU. It is unacceptable.”
India says 'open' to return of undocumented immigrants in US
- India was working with the Trump administration on the deportation of around 18,000 Indians
Washington: India is prepared to take back its citizens residing illegally in the United States, foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has said after meeting the top diplomat of President Donald Trump’s new administration.
Jaishankar’s remarks came after a meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington on Tuesday a day after Trump’s inauguration.
Trump issued a raft of executive orders this week that aim to clamp down on illegal immigration and expedite his goal of deporting millions of immigrants.
Jaishankar said New Delhi was open to taking back undocumented Indians and was in the process of verifying those in the United States who could be deported to India.
“We want Indian talent and Indian skills to have the maximum opportunity at the global level. At the same time, we are also very firmly opposed to illegal mobility and illegal migration,” Jaishankar told a group of Indian reporters in Washington on Wednesday.
“So, with every country, and the US is no exception, we have always taken the view that if any of our citizens are here illegally, and if we are sure that they are our citizens, we have always been open to their legitimate return to India.”
Jaishankar was responding to a query on news reports that India was working with the Trump administration on the deportation of around 18,000 Indians who are either undocumented, or have overstayed their visas.
Rubio had “emphasized the Trump administration’s desire to work with India to advance economic ties and address concerns related to irregular migration,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a readout after Tuesday’s meeting.
India is the world’s fifth-largest economy and enjoys world-beating GDP growth, but hundreds of thousands of its citizens still leave the country each year seeking better opportunities abroad.
While its diaspora spans the globe, the United States remains the destination of choice.
The most recent US census showed its Indian-origin population had grown by 50 percent to 4.8 million in the decade to 2020, while more than a third of the nearly 1.3 million Indian students studying abroad in 2022 were in the United States.
As Trump declares ‘Gulf of America,’ US enters name wars
- “In claiming the right to force others to use the name of his choosing, Trump is asserting a sort of sovereignty over an international body of water,” Gerry Kearns, a professor of geography at Maynooth University in Ireland
WASHINGTON: For years, as disputes over names on the map riled up nationalist passions in several parts of the world, US policymakers have watched warily, trying to stay out or to quietly encourage peace.
Suddenly, the United States has gone from a reluctant arbiter to a nomenclature belligerent, as President Donald Trump declared that the Gulf of Mexico will henceforth be called the “Gulf of America.”
In an executive order signed hours after he returned to the White House, Trump called the water body an “indelible part of America” critical to US oil production and fishing and “a favorite destination for American tourism and recreation activities.”
The term Gulf of America was soon used by the US Coast Guard in a press release on enforcing Trump’s new crackdown on migrants, as well as Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, when discussing a winter storm.
Deep-sea ecologist Andrew Thaler said Trump’s declaration was “very silly” and would likely be ignored by maritime professionals.
A president has the authority to rename sites within the United States — as Trump also did.
“The Gulf of Mexico, however, is a body of water that borders several countries and includes pockets of high seas,” said Thaler, founder of Blackbeard Biologic Science and Environmental Advisers.
“There really isn’t any precedent for a US president renaming international geologic and oceanographic features. Any attempt to rename the entire Gulf of Mexico would be entirely symbolic,” he said.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has cheekily suggested calling the United States “Mexican America,” pointing to a map from well before Washington seized one-third of her country in 1848.
“For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico,” she said Tuesday.
The International Hydrographic Organization, set up a century ago, works to survey the world’s seas and oceans and is the closest to an authority on harmonizing names for international waters.
The United Nations also has an expert group on geographical names, which opens its next meeting on April 28.
Martin H. Levinson, president emeritus of the Institute of General Semantics, said it was unknown how much political capital Trump would invest in seeking name recognition by other countries.
“Does he really want to strong-arm them for something as minor as this?” Levinson asked.
“I think the political benefit is to the domestic audience that he’s playing to — saying we’re patriotic, this is our country, we’re not going to let the name be subsumed by other countries,” he said.
He doubted that other countries would change the name but said it was possible Google Earth — a more ready reference to laypeople — could list an alternative name, as it has in other disputes.
Among the most heated disputes, South Korea has long resented calling the body of water to its east the Sea of Japan and has advocated for it to be called the East Sea.
The United States, an ally of both countries, has kept Sea of Japan but Korean-Americans have pushed at the local level for school textbooks to say East Sea.
In the Middle East, Trump in his last term angered Iranians by publicly using the term Arabian Gulf for the oil-rich water body historically known as the Arabian Gulf but which Arab nationalists have sought to rename.
The United States has also advocated maintaining a 2018 deal where Greece agreed for its northern neighbor to change its name to North Macedonia from Macedonia, but Athens ulitmately rejected due to historical associations with Alexander the Great.
Gerry Kearns, a professor of geography at Maynooth University in Ireland, said that Trump’s move was part of the “geopolitics of spectacle” but also showed his ideological bent.
With Trump also threatening to take the Panama Canal and Greenland, Trump is seeking to project a new type of Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 declaration by the United States that it would dominate the Western Hemisphere, Kearns said.
“Names work because they are shared; we know we are talking about the same thing,” he wrote in an essay.
“In claiming the right to force others to use the name of his choosing, Trump is asserting a sort of sovereignty over an international body of water.”
