[News] Coronavirus update: India is facing a 'severe, intensive' second wave

[Mr.Talha]

 

By the middle of February, health workers at an expansive hospital in western India were beginning to believe that the coronavirus pandemic's deadly surge was rapidly easing.

There were only 28 patients in the Covid-19 ward of the 1,000-bed non-profit Kasturba Hospital in Wardha, Maharashtra - down from 180 patients at the peak of the pandemic last summer. The intensive care unit (ICU) was empty for the first time in months.

A third of the 300 beds in the Covid-19 ward had been moved out to other wards to accommodate patients suffering from other diseases. There had been a sharp drop in reported infections countrywide and Wardha was no exception. In most cities, life was returning to normal. Healthcare workers and frontline staff had begun receiving jabs of the coronavirus vaccine.

At the Kasturba Hospital, health workers had endured a gruelling year - as many as 70 of them had been infected by the virus, and many others had suffered crippling fatigue and burnout.

But the sense of relief among the 650 doctors and nurses turned out to be cruelly short-lived.

"Our celebrations were premature," Dr SP Kalantri, medical superintendent of the hospital, told me.

India's second wave has not spared this hospital, some 50 miles (80km) south-west of Nagpur, one of India's worst-hit cities.