Faced with a severe shortage of ICU and general beds the government hospitals in capital Dhaka are struggling to cope with a steady stream of Covid-19 patients, many of them coming from outside the city in critical condition. The rush has filled the Intensive Care Units (ICUs) to the brim and forced the authorities to admit patients more than their capacity. And yet many have been kept in the waiting list for a bed, while others have simply been asked to hunt beds in other hospitals. That includes even the critical patients who need intensive care. Read: Khulna division sees 46 Covid deaths amid deepening crisis According to the Health Department, there are 16 government hospitals in the capital dedicated to Covid patients. Three of these hospitals don’t have any ICU. Seven of the remaining 13 hospitals had no ICU bed empty as of Saturday.    In the remaining six hospitals, only 40 ICU beds were available as of Saturday, said the authorities adding things are changing by hours.   Read Liquid Medical Oxygen and Covid-19 Treatment: Things we need to know The pressure has mounted on the Dhaka hospitals as patients are arriving from other adjoining district hospitals for shortage of ICU facilities there. The few ICU beds are already full. ICU beds are not easily available in the districts. An average of 25 patients need ICU in the hospitals designated for coronavirus in the capital.

Seema Gandotra, sick with the coronavirus, gasped for breath in an ambulance for 10 hours, as it tried unsuccessfully at six hospitals in India’s sprawling capital to find an open bed. By the time she was admitted, it was too late, and the 51-year-old died hours later. Rajiv Tiwari, whose oxygen levels began falling after he tested positive for the virus, has the opposite problem: He identified an open bed, but the 30-something resident of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh can’t get to it. “There is no ambulance to take me to hospital,” he said. Such tragedies are familiar from surges in other parts of the world — but were largely unknown in India, which was able to prevent a collapse in its health system last year through a harsh lockdown. But now they are everyday occurrences in the vast country, which is seeing its largest surge of the pandemic so far and watching its chronically underfunded health system crumble. Tests are delayed. Medical oxygen is scarce. Hospitals are understaffed and overflowing. Intensive care units are full. Nearly all ventilators are in use, and the dead are piling up at crematoriums and graveyards. India recorded over 250,000 new infections and over 1,700 deaths in the past 24 hours alone, and the U.K. announced a travel ban on most visitors from the country this week. Overall, India has reported more than 15 million cases and some 180,000 deaths — and experts say these numbers are likely an undercounts. India’s wave of cases is contributing to a worldwide rise in infections as many places experience deepening crises, such as Brazil and France, spurred in part by new, more contagious variants, including one first detected in India. More than a year into the pandemic, global deaths have passed 3 million and are climbing again, running at nearly 12,000 per day on average. At the same time, vaccination campaigns have seen setbacks in many places — and India’s surge has only exacerbated that: The country is a major vaccine producer but was forced it to delay deliveries of shots to focus on its domestic demand. Also read: Indian capital gasps for oxygen Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan who has been tracking India’s pandemic, said India failed to learn from surges elsewhere and take anticipatory measures. When new infections started dipping in September, authorities thought the worst of the pandemic was over. Health Minister Harsh Vardhan even declared in March that the country had entered the “endgame” — but he was already behind the curve: Average weekly cases in Maharashtra state, home to the financial capital of Mumbai, had tripled in the previous month. Mukherjee was among those who had urged authorities to take advantage of cases being low earlier in the year to speed up vaccinations. Instead officials dithered in limiting huge gatherings during Hindu festivals and refused to delay ongoing elections in the eastern West Bengal state, where experts fear that large, unmasked crowds at rallies will fuel the spread of the virus. Now India’s two largest cities have imposed strict lockdowns, the pain of which will fall inordinately on the poor. Many have already left major cities, fearing a repeat of last year, when an abrupt lockdown forced many migrant workers to walk to their home villages or risk starvation. New Delhi, the capital, is rushing to convert schools into hospitals. Field hospitals in hard-hit cities that had been abandoned are being resuscitated. India is trying to import oxygen and has started to divert oxygen supplies from industry to the health system. Also read: India's capital to lock down as nation's virus cases top 15M It remains to be seen whether these frantic efforts will be enough. New Delhi’s government-run Sanjay Gandhi Hospital is increasing its beds for COVID-19 patients from 46 to 160. But R. Meneka, the official coordinating the COVID-19 response at the hospital, said he wasn’t sure if the facility had the capacity to provide oxygen to that many beds. The government-run hospital at Burari, an industrial hub in the capitals’ outskirts, only had oxygen for two days Monday, and found that most vendors in the city had run out, said Ramesh Verma, who coordinates the COVID-19 response there. “Every minute, we keep getting hundreds of calls for beds,” he said. Kamla Devi, a 71-year-old diabetic, was rushed to a hospital in New Delhi when her blood sugar levels fell last week. On returning home, her levels plummeted again but this time, there were no beds. She died before she could be tested for the virus. “If you have corona(virus) or if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. The hospitals have no place for you,” said Dharmendra Kumar, her son. Laboratories were unprepared for the steep rise in demand for testing that came with the current surge, and everyone was “caught with their pants down,” said A. Velumani, the chairman and managing director of Thyrocare, one of India’s largest private testing labs. He said that the current demand was three times that of last year. Also read: India records over 260,000 daily COVID-19 cases, tally at 14,788,109 India’s massive vaccination drive is also struggling. Several states have flagged shortages, although the federal government has claimed there are enough stocks. India said last week that it would allow the use of all COVID-19 shots that had been greenlit by the World Health Organization or regulators in the United States, Europe, Britain or Japan. On Monday, it said that it would soon expand vaccinations to include every adult in the country, an estimated 900 million people. But with vaccine in short global supply, it isn’t clear when Indian vaccine makers will have the capacity to meet these goals. Indian vaccine maker Bharat Biotech said it was scaling up to make 700 million doses each year. Meanwhile, Shahid Malik, who works at a small supplier of oxygen, said that the demand for medical oxygen had increased by a factor of 10. His phone has been ringing continuously for two days. By Monday, the shop still had oxygen but no cylinders. He answered each call with the same message: “If you have your own cylinder, come pick up the oxygen. If you don’t, we can’t help you.”

The Election Commission (EC) has postponed all elections scheduled for April 11 amid a massive surge in Covid-19 cases in recent days. “Considering the overall coronavirus situation, the Commission has postponed the Laxmipur-2 by-polls, first phase election to 371 Union Parishads and the sixth phase election to 11 municipalities, which were all scheduled slated for April 11,” EC’s Additional Secretary Ashok Kumar Debnath told reporters. The decision came from a meeting in the afternoon at the Nirbachan Bhaban with Chief Election Commissioner KM Nurul Huda in the chair. Bangladesh has been recording more than 5,000 cases per day since Monday. On Thursday, the health authorities confirmed 6,469 cases, the highest-ever daily case count since the first ones were announced on March 20 last year. Also read: Covid-19: Bangladesh records highest-ever daily cases, 59 deaths Debnath said these elections would not be held until the covid situation improves. The parliamentary by-polls and elections to the local bodies would be held from the stage where they were postponed, he added. He said the candidates will have to keep their campaign suspended until the fresh date is announced for balloting. EC announced schedules for these elections on March 11. The deadline for submission of nomination was March 18. The nomination papers were scrutinised on March 19 and the last date for withdrawal of candidature was March 24. The countrywide Union Parishad elections were supposed to kick off with polls to 371 at 64 upazilas of 19 districts. Meanwhile, the EC announced the sixth phase municipal election to 11 bodies. It has already held elections to some 230 municipalities in the first five phases between December 28 and February 28 last. The Laxmipur-2 constituency fell vacant on January 28 after independent MP Mohammad Shahid Islam alias Kazi Papul was convicted by a Kuwait court for criminal offenses.

Faulting inaction in Washington, governors and state lawmakers are racing to get pandemic relief to small-business owners, the unemployed, renters and others whose livelihoods have been upended by the widening coronavirus outbreak.