India is particularly suffering from the corona pandemic. Aids such as ventilators are urgently needed. Yet there are at least 191 medical ventilators that are not in use in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh alone.
The devices collect loudly, especially in smaller regional hospitals hindustantimes.com. Here there is often a lack of technical accessories, oxygen, but above all there is a lack of trained anesthetists who should operate the devices.
Until the pandemic, the mountain state only had 52 ventilators. In June 2020, 574 were delivered and distributed to hospitals. The state in northern India had also received 50 ventilators from Switzerland. It is not known whether these belong to the unused devices.
At the beginning of May, Switzerland had sent several hundred oxygen concentrators and these 50 ventilators to India. The total costs, most of which are covered by the DDPS, amount to just under three million francs.
263,000 infections in one day
Since the pandemic began, more than 25 million people in India have been shown to have contracted the coronavirus, 280,000 have died. In the past 24 hours, more than 263,000 new infections were recorded, as figures from the Indian Ministry of Health showed on Tuesday.
The number of detected new infections has recently tended to decline. However, the pandemic is increasingly shifting to the rural regions of India – and there are significantly fewer test options and poorer health care there.
The number of unreported corona cases is likely to be correspondingly high. According to official information, 4,329 people died with or from Corona in the past 24 hours – a high for India since the beginning of the pandemic. (gf)