Families beg and barter for air as India’s coronavirus crisis sparks a hunt for oxygen – World News

Desperate relatives of coronavirus sufferers in India have been forced to beg and barter for oxygen as the crisis there deepens.

The Asian country has become the epicentre of the worldwide pandemic and on Sunday it reported a global record for the most number of infections in a day with 354,531 new cases.

Outside a Sikh temple in the east of the Indian capital, New Delhi, the road is packed with vehicles full of sick or dying Covid sufferers who are desperate to get hold of oxygen.

Such is their desperation they were forced to suck air from bottles of oxygen on the street which had been provided for free by a Sikh charity.

Hospitals are so overwhelmed they have been begging for oxygen supplies while those that are unable to obtain air are left to die on the streets while waiting their turn.

For the fourth day running Sikh Khalsa Help International charity has been supplying oxygen to people rather than the Government.

Kind-hearted volunteers are helping the charity as the country is gripped by a second Covid wave which is rampaging through the nation.

Gurpreet Singh, charity founder told Sky News : “I don’t know what the government is doing. If we can do this, why can’t they?”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the coronavirus storm ‘has shaken the nation’.

But his government has faced criticism for allowing large religious and political gatherings to take place earlier this year when India’s cases fell to below 10,000 a day.

Siddiqui Ahmad brought his 32-year-old son Abu Sadat to beg for air from the charity after ‘being turned away from everywhere’.

He is one of the thousands of Indians who have been reduced to bartering, begging or borrowing air and his desperate mum said ‘no one would help’.

Siddiqui pleaded with the over-pressed volunteers to tend to his ‘weak and motionless’ son and they hooked him up to an oxygen tank.

He is very weak but he is alive – just.

The second wave of the pandemic in India has resulted in one Covid-19 death in just under every four minutes in Delhi.

Crematoriums across Delhi are so filled up that grieving families are told they must now wait.

But the UK will deliver ventilators and other vital medical supplies to help stricken hospitals in India which will arrive this week.

The Government confirmed nine airline containers filled with supplies, including oxygen concentrators and ventilators, will be shipped to the country.

The first tranche of medical kit is expected to arrive in New Delhi on Tuesday, with further supplies from the UK’s surplus stock to be sent in the coming days.

The EU and America have both said they are ready to help but people in India too.