Covid-19: India’s daily coronavirus death toll sets new record

Twenty patients died in one night at one New Delhi hospital suffering from oxygen shortages, medical officials said.

India’s daily coronavirus death toll set a new record on Saturday as the government battled to get oxygen to hospitals overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of new daily cases.

Twenty patients died in one night at one New Delhi hospital suffering from oxygen shortages, medical officials said. A Delhi court said that the new pandemic wave had become “a tsunami”.

Queues of Covid-19 patients and their fearful relatives were growing outside hospitals in major cities across India, the world’s new pandemic hotspot, which has now reported nearly one million new cases in three days.

Another 2,624 deaths were reported in 24 hours, taking the official toll to nearly 190,000 since the pandemic started.

More than 340,000 new cases were also reported, taking India’s total to 16.5 million, second only to the United States.

But many experts are predicting the current wave will not peak for at least three weeks and that the real death toll and case count are much higher.

Germany, Kuwait and Iran on Saturday followed the UAE, Britain and New Zealand in restricting travel from the country.