Germany mourns its 80,000 Covid dead; Coronavirus crisis deepens across India

New Delhi: More government hospital beds will be freed for Covid-19 patients, India’s health ministry said Sunday, as the vast nation grappled with a worsening virus crisis and states appealed for additional supplies of oxygen and treatment drugs.

The country of 1.3 billion people added a record-high of 261,500 new cases on Sunday, with one-in-six people who underwent tests returning positive coronavirus results, the ministry said.

India is the world’s second most-infected nation with almost 14.8 million cases. Hospitals usually reserved for employees of ministries or public sector companies should convert some of their wards into Covid-19 facilities equipped with ICU and oxygen-supported beds, ventilators, laboratories and healthcare staff, the government said.

"This will go a long way to address the shortage of beds being reported from some states," the ministry added. The railway ministry said special trains would transport oxygen tankers to needy states. In the capital New Delhi -- the worst-hit city in India -- 25,500 infections were reported in the past 24 hours.

"The cases are rising very fast," Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said in a video statement. "Only 100 beds left. Even oxygen is in short supply." Kejriwal said additional beds would be set up at some schools and a sport complex.

His government added that millions of pilgrims who attended an ongoing religious festival -- the Kumbh Mela -- had to quarantine for two weeks if they returned to Delhi. Nearly 3,700 people have tested positive in the past week in the city of Haridwar, which lies along the Ganges river where the Kumbh Mela is being observed, the Uttarakhand state government said. Health experts have warned the festival could become a "super-spreader" event.

In West Bengal state, where an election is being held over several phases with rival parties holding huge rallies -- sparking further super-spreader fears -- Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee appealed for more oxygen and coronavirus medicines such as remdesivir.

Banerjee added that her state needed more vaccines to tackle the outbreak. India has administered more than 122 million jabs so far, but some states have complained of low stocks and experts have said that the rollout needs to be sped up.

Both Banerjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party held large election campaigns on Sunday. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Congress party, a small player in the West Bengal polls, tweeted Sunday that he was suspending all his rallies in the state "in view of the covid situation".

Meanwhile, Germany held a national memorial service on Sunday for its nearly 80,000 victims of the coronavirus pandemic, putting aside deep divisions over Covid restrictions to share the pain of grieving families.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier joined an ecumenical service in the morning at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a memorial against war and destruction.

They will later attend a ceremony at the capital’s Konzerthaus concert hall, where the president will make a speech. "Sickness, dying and death cannot be just pushed away in this long year, they have cut deeply into the lives of many people," said Georg Baetzing, the chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, at the morning service.

With pandemic curbs still in force restricting the number of people who can attend, the ceremonies were being broadcast live on public television. "As president I believe it is very important for us to stop to say goodbye in dignity to those who died during the pandemic -- including those who did not fall victim to the virus but who also died in loneliness," said Steinmeier as he announced the national service.

Besides suffering the pain of losing a loved one, restrictions in place to curb infections mean that relatives are often unable to even hold their family members’ hands as they lay dying. Others have been left grieving on their own, as funerals or memorials are curtailed by pandemic curbs. In a dialogue with the president earlier this year, relatives of coronavirus victims voiced their loneliness.

Michaela Mengel broke down in tears as she recalled her daughter’s last minutes as she died from the coronavirus in hospital. "Last time I saw her alive was on Christmas Eve when I had to leave the hospital. She had oxygen piped into her nose, she looked at me with her big eyes," Mengel told the president at the time.

"Since she could not talk I told her, bye my dear, I love you, mama will be back." Mengel is to attend the memorial ceremony on Sunday afternoon. Steinmeier stressed that it was important to look beyond the daily victim counts.

"Behind every number, there’s a human fate," he said. Regional leaders urged citizens to join in the remembrance including by lighting candles by their windows from Friday to Sunday. "We want to be aware of what we lost, but we also want to find hope and strength together," the premiers of Germany’s 16 states said in a statement.

Sunday’s ceremony comes as health authorities warn that many more will succumb to the virus, as Germany struggles to put down a vicious third wave gripping the country. Europe’s biggest economy had come out of the first wave relatively unscathed but has struggled to take decisive action to end the current one fuelled mainly by the more contagious British variant.

Another 19,185 new infections were recorded in the last 24 hours, according to the disease control agency RKI, with the numbers of deaths also rising by 67 to 79,914. Merkel’s government is seeking greater powers to impose tougher measures such as night-time curfews, in a bid to circumvent Germany’s powerful regional authorities, some of whom have resisted implementing tough restrictions.

In a related development, after a year working brutally long hours on the "Covid front-line", hospital interns in France are at breaking point, to the extent that some of them have even committed suicide, according to a national union.

"These interns are invisible, but they are front-line soldiers," hospital clinical psychologist Anne Rocher told AFP. France has over 300,000 medical student interns, whose average age is 25.

In theory, they work 48-hour weeks, "but nobody cares" about that, said Marie Saleten, one of the interns and vice-president of the union for Paris hospitals interns. According to a study carried out over a three-month period in 2019 by the national interns’ union ISNI, 58-hour weeks were actually the norm.