By Haruna Gimba with agency report
Indian government has pledged to bolster vaccine supplies as some states in the country said they would extend COVID-19 lockdowns to help contain the pandemic, which has killed more than 270,000 people in the country.
The number of deaths from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours in India has risen more than 4,000 for the fourth time in a week, with Sunday’s 311,170 new infections representing the lowest single-day rise in more than three weeks.
Federal health officials warned against any complacency over a ‘plateauing’ in the rise of infections, however, and urged states to add intensive care units and strengthen their medical workforces.
The northern states of Delhi and Haryana extended lockdowns, slated to end on Monday, by a week.
Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said the rate of positive cases compared with overall tests carried out had come down to 10 percent from as high as 30 percent earlier this month.
“The gains we have made over the past week, we don’t want to lose them. So we are going to extend the lockdown for another week,” Kejriwal told reporters.
The southern state of Kerala, which has previously announced a lockdown extension, also introduced stricter restrictions in some districts on Saturday. It warned that people not wearing masks where required or violating quarantine protocols faced being arrested, with drones used to help identify violators.
The government said it would send an additional 5.1 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to states over the next three days.
Even though India is the world’s largest vaccine-producing nation, only 141.6 million people have received at least one vaccine dose, or roughly 10 percent of its population of 1.35 billion, according to health ministry data.
The country has fully vaccinated just over 40.4 million people, or 2.9 percent of its population.
While lockdowns have helped limit cases in parts of the country that had been hit by an initial surge of infections in February and April, such as Maharashtra and Delhi, rural areas and some states are dealing with fresh surges.
The government issued detailed guidelines on Sunday for monitoring COVID-19 cases that were spreading in India’s vast countryside.
The health ministry asked villages to look out for cases of flu-like illness and get such patients tested for COVID-19.
India’s total infections have risen by more than 2 million this week, and deaths by nearly 28,000. Deaths rose by 4,077 on Sunday.
Bodies of COVID-19 victims were found to have been dumped in some rivers, the government of the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh said in a letter seen by Reuters, in the first official acknowledgement of the alarming practice.
