Oxygen grows scarce in India as cases continue to rise

Oxygen supply has grown scarce in some parts of India hard hit by coronavirus, hospital and local government officials said, as India reported a record daily jump in cases for a second consecutive day, report agencies.
India reported 94,372 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, taking total cases past 4.7 million, as infection numbers rose in several states amid a gradual opening up of businesses.
With total cases, India is the world's second worst affected country, trailing only the United States, which has more than 6.4 million cases.
The global coronavirus death count soared to 925,613 on Sunday, according to www.worldometers.info tally.
Data compiled by worldometers showed the globally confirmed cases standing at 29,018,220.
The US, which is the worst affected country, has reported 6,482,523 confirmed cases with 193,670 fatalities.
Brazil is the third worst-hit country with 4,315,687 confirmed cases and 131,210 deaths.
Total COVID-19 deaths stood at 77,472, putting India in third place in a ranking of countries' fatalities. But the growth in infections in India is faster than anywhere else in the world, as cases surge through urban and rural areas.
The western state of Maharashtra has been particularly hard-hit, with total confirmed cases breaching the 1 million mark late on Friday, making it the first state or province anywhere in the world to cross that mark.
If the state, which is India's richest, were a country, it would rival Russia for the fourth highest number of coronavirus cases globally.
In some parts of the state, medical oxygen was becoming hard to find. Dr Amit Thadhani, Medical Director of Niramaya Hospitals in Panvel, a suburb of India's financial capital Mumbai, said the shortage in his area was acute.
"The problem is that the filling stations are themselves not getting supply of oxygen from the manufacturers. Supplies are extremely limited," Thadhani said.
"If we ask for 50 cylinders, we may get about 5 to 7."
An official from the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation in a neighbouring suburb said they had received reports from multiple hospitals about dwindling oxygen supplies and made requests to state authorities. "Demand has risen in last few day because of rising cases," the official said.
The Corporation's commissioner Abhijit Bangar was not immediately available for comment.
Government officials and experts said the unabated rise in cases in Maharashtra and other parts of the country were likely a result of economic activity restarting, local festivals and lockdown fatigue.
"I am so disappointed with the pandemic situation in India," Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan, who has been tracking India's COVID situation closely, said on Twitter.
"It is getting worse and worse each week but a large part of the nation seems to have made the choice to ignore this crisis," she said
Another report adds: Accelerating the development of and equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics for COVID-19 has been a priority for WHO since the beginning of the pandemic.
"Already, we have made remarkable progress," WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a media briefing last week (10 September).
"Around 180 vaccines are now in development, including 35 that are in human trials. No disease in history has seen such rapid development in research."
"Now, the world's ambition to develop these tools as fast as possible must be matched by its ambition to ensure as many people as possible have access to them." In April, together with the European Commission and multiple other partners, WHO launched the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, to catalyse the development of and equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.
The Access to COVID-19 Tools ACT-Accelerator is a global collaboration to accelerate the development, production, and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines. It was set up in response to a call from G20 leaders in March and launched by the WHO, European Commission, France and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in April 2020.
Currently, the ACT Accelerator is supporting research into promising vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. But the Accelerator will not be able to deliver on its goals without a significant increase in funding, Dr Tedros warned.
"The 2.7 billion US dollars it has received to date has been generous and has enabled the robust start-up phase. But this is less than 10 percent of the overall needs. The ACT Accelerator still faces a funding gap of 35 billion US dollars."