Bengaluru reportedly has the highest active Covid case-load ever seen in any Indian city. Hospital beds and oxygen are in short supply. By...
Bengaluru reportedly has the highest active Covid case-load ever seen in any Indian city. Hospital beds and oxygen are in short supply. By late April several hospitals in the city were already facing oxygen crises. As in Delhi, the lack of oxygen seems likely to lead to tragic and avoidable deaths.
How bad is the surge?
To say that Bengaluru’s epidemic is huge is an understatement. According to the city’s bulletins, in the week from April 29 to May 5 it registered 1.5 lakh cases. This is a staggering case-load in a city with an estimated 2021 population of 12.7 million. It is about three times Mumbai’s highest-ever weekly new cases. This one week’s cases are, in fact, 18% of the city’s total cases during the pandemic so far.
To put the current numbers in perspective, weekly cases are five times higher than during last year’s peak, and an astonishing one hundred times higher than three months ago.
Test positivity has also been rising fast. Thirty seven percent of all Covid-19 tests returned positive during the week ending May 5. This compares to 20% the previous week, and just 12% the week before that. Many, many infections are surely going undetected as testing fails to match spread.
A surge in Covid-19 deaths, some of them unrecorded
In the week...
