India has ordered its armed forces to help tackle surging new coronavirus infections, as nations including Britain, Germany and the United States pledged urgent medical aid to try to contain an emergency overwhelming the country’s hospitals.
Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat said late on Monday that oxygen would be released from armed forces reserves and retired medical personnel would join health facilities that are struggling under the sheer number of cases.
Briefing Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the army’s preparations to deal with the crisis, Rawat said any oxygen cylinders the military had would be diverted to hospitals in need of the life-saving gas.
Other retired medical officers have been urged to provide consultations through emergency helplines, according to a government statement.
The situation in the world’s second most populous country is “beyond heartbreaking”, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, adding that WHO was sending extra staff and supplies including oxygen concentrator devices.
Oxygen is running out, intensive care units are operating at full capacity and nearly all ventilators are in use.
Crematoriums have been are overwhelmed and bodies are being burned in the open air.
“If you’ve never been to a cremation, the smell of death never leaves you,” Vipin Narang, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, said on Twitter.
Experts say even those figures are probably lower than the actual number of deaths.
The new infections brought India’s total to more than 17.3 million, behind only the United States.
