Nearly two hundred missing in India by Cyclone Tauktae
If a devastating second wave of coronavirus, the worst the world has seen in the entire pandemic, was not enough, Tauktae arrived in India this morning. He has done it at a speed of up to 210 kilometers per hour. Burmese meteorologists named Tauktae, the name of a lizard, a cyclone equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane that has hit the west coast state of Gujarat.
It had been two decades since a tropical storm from the Arabian Sea had hit India with this force.. Tauktae has left behind at least twenty dead and almost two hundred missing. Off the coast of Mumbai, the financial capital, the waves caused by the cyclone have sunk two ships stationed next to the oil platforms. The boats had about 400 crew members.. The Defense Ministry said they were able to rescue 177.
Before the arrival of Tauktae, which has destroyed more than 16,000 homes, trees and mobile phone towers in its path, the authorities evacuated more than 200,000 people from their homes in the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, two of the most daily cases of infections are reporting. Over the weekend, in anticipation of the force of the cyclone, in Mumbai they transferred 600 patients from the field hospitals set up due to the lack of beds in conventional medical centers.
Protect hospitals saturated with covid
The authorities also made sure that no patients were left in hospitals that are less than five kilometers from the Gujarat coast because the sea level was going to rise three meters. And they have ensured that there are no power outages at hospitals in the state where they treat Covid-19 patients.. More than 1,000 hospitals in coastal cities received generators and the vaccination campaign has been suspended for two days.
Tauktae is hindering the response to try to stop a second wave that has led India to exceed 25 million infections and 275,000 deaths. The second most populous country in the world has been exceeding 300,000 daily infections since April 21. In the last seven days the number of deaths every 24 hours did not drop below 4,000. Accounts for 90% of cases and deaths in Southeast Asia.
The images are repeated in a loop one day after another: hospitals without available beds or oxygen concentrators, improvised crematoriums in the streets…. In addition, the viral crisis was accompanied by a strange variant that the WHO, in the words of its main scientist, Maria Van Kerkhove, described as “global concern”.. All this occurs in a country of 1,350 million inhabitants where only 3.0% of its population (40 million) has been vaccinated.
“India has to shut down,” Anthony Fauci, the top adviser on US coronavirus policy, said last week.. “I think several of the states in India have already done that, but the chain of transmission needs to be broken.. And one of the ways to do that is to shut down,” Fauci insisted.. India’s capital, New Delhi, has been on lockdown for five weeks as residents fight for scarce hospital beds and oxygen supplies. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi is holding out without decreeing a mass confinement as he did in March last year.
Dozens of countries are sending India medical supplies and oxygen tanks. And the Defense Ministry has just announced that it will recruit 400 former army doctors to support its overwhelmed health care system.
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