Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party looked likely on Sunday to gain seats but fall short of victory in a key election in West Bengal, shadowed by criticism that his mishandling of the pandemic had fueled a catastrophic surge of cases in India.
Many Indians were stunned that the elections were even held. The country is facing its greatest crisis in decades, with a second wave of the coronavirus causing vast sickness and death. Hospitals are so full that people are dying in the streets.
In New Delhi, there is an acute shortage of medical oxygen, and dozens have died gasping in their hospital beds. Cremation grounds are working day and night, burning thousands of bodies. The country is rife with the more lethal and more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant of the coronavirus first found in Britain, as well as a homegrown variant called B.1.617. Experts are worried that the unchecked outbreak will spawn more dangerous variants of the coronavirus.
On Sunday, India reported nearly 3,700 deaths, its highest daily toll yet. Over the weekend, the country logged 401,993 new cases and then 392,488, tallies that no other country has ever seen. And experts say the real toll is far higher.
Mr. Modi was scheduled to meet with his health minister on Sunday to discuss the oxygen shortage and concerns that doctors and nurses are overwhelmed and exhausted. On Saturday, Indian officials announced that the first batch of the Russian vaccine, Sputnik V, had arrived, a boost to India’s flagging inoculation campaign.
Critics have blasted Mr. Modi’s handling of the crisis. A sudden, harsh lockdown imposed early in the pandemic sent millions of laborers scrambling back to their home villages and disrupted the economy. When cases dropped, his government failed to heed warnings of a potential resurgence from scientists, and its own Covid-19 task force did not meet for months. Mr. Modi himself declared a premature victory over Covid in late January, during what proved to be a mere lull in infections.
Dr. Manisha Jadhav, the chief medical officer at the Group of Tuberculosis Hospitals in Mumbai, died on April 19 in a hospital in that city. She was 51. The cause was complications of Covid-19, her husband said.
Her job involved managing the hospital’s staff and handling its operations. When the pandemic hit Mumbai in March 2020, she quickly organized personal protective equipment for the hospital’s workers amid a severe shortage, ensured that they had food and made travel arrangements for the staff when public transport was suspended during the lockdown.
She was one of 13 doctors honored for their efforts by the governor of Maharashtra State in December.
“Doctors are like soldiers,” she would say. “They can’t be unavailable.”
Manisha Ramugade was born in Mumbai on May 11, 1969, to Ram and Ratan Ramugade. Her father was a postal worker, her mother a homemaker. She was the youngest of four siblings.
“As a kid, she would tell us that she wanted to become a doctor, and joke about giving injections,” her sister Sunita said.
Along with her husband and her sister Sunita, Dr. Jadhav is survived by her son, Darshan, a medical student in Ukraine, and another sister, Anita. Her brother, Ravi, died last year.
In recent months, the chief executive of Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, has come under increasingly intense pressure as both pro-government voices and leaders of the state governments headed by opposition politicians criticized him.
Some accused him for delays in supplying vaccines; some called him a “profiteer” for not offering Covid-19 vaccines to state governments at cost. There were calls for his company to be nationalized.
In an interview with The Times of London published on Saturday, the executive, Adar Poonawalla, described menacing calls from some of the most powerful men in India, creating an environment so ugly that he anticipated being out of the country for an extended period while he made plans to start producing vaccines elsewhere.
“‘Threats’ is an understatement,” Mr. Poonawalla said. “The level of expectation and aggression is really unprecedented.”
The interview reported that he had flown into London to join his wife and children hours before Britain barred travelers from India on April 23.
“I’m staying here an extended time, because I don’t want to go back to that situation,” he added. “Everything falls on my shoulders, but I can’t do it alone.”
The interview set off a storm on social media, with some interpreting his interest in manufacturing outside India as a threat to move his business and others seeing him as having been driven out of the country by the viciousness of his critics.
Within hours, Mr. Poonawalla wrote on Twitter that he would be returning to India “in a few days.”
Had an excellent meeting with all our partners & stakeholders in the U.K. Meanwhile, pleased to state that COVISHIELD’s production is in full swing in Pune. I look forward to reviewing operations upon my return in a few days.
— Adar Poonawalla (@adarpoonawalla) May 1, 2021
The New York Times was unable to reach Mr. Poonawalla directly on Saturday, and a request for comment from his company was not immediately returned.
India, the world’s leading producer of vaccines, is struggling to vaccinate itself out of a crisis as a voracious second wave leaves a tableau of death and despair. When cases were relatively low, the country exported more than 60 million shots. On Saturday, India expanded vaccination eligibility to all people over age 18, but many states said that they would not be able to meet the demand because of a shortage of doses.
Less than 2 percent of India’s 940 million adults have been fully vaccinated, according to data compiled from government sources by the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. Several states have reported vaccine shortages, enough to derail plans in some to expand access to everyone 18 and over on Saturday.
All that has made Mr. Poonawalla, a 40-year-old billionaire, a focus for public anger.
Last month, Serum Institute wrote a letter to India’s federal home minister asking for security, citing the threats to Mr. Poonawalla. Just a few days ago, the federal government said it had completed a threat assessment and would have the Central Reserve Police Force protect him. On the same day, Mr. Poonawalla announced on Twitter that he was unilaterally lowering the cost of a Covid vaccine to make it more affordable for government purchase.
Dr. Angelique Ramirez, the chief medical officer of the main health care system in Fairbanks, Alaska, started the monthly coronavirus briefing in April by saying that she thought March’s meeting would be the last. But amid a new surge of cases in the state, one of the country’s worst surges, Dr. Ramirez was blunt about her past assessment.
“I was wrong,” she said.
With nearly 100,000 people, the Fairbanks metropolitan area is Alaska’s second largest and the largest in the state’s vast interior. According to a New York Times database, the number of new coronavirus cases in the borough of which Fairbanks is the seat, North Star, has risen by 253 percent over the past two weeks. The positivity rate has doubled since March, to about 10 percent from 5 percent, and hospitalizations at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, the area’s only hospital, have hit a record number.
“This place is on fire with Covid,” Dr. Barb Creighton, an internist at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, said at the meeting.
Experts are unsure what is driving the surge, though a low vaccination rate certainly plays a role. Thirty-six percent of Alaskans are fully vaccinated, and in some boroughs that number is over 50 percent, but in the Fairbanks area just 29 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated.
“There is no big outbreak or two big outbreaks that are really driving this,” said Dr. Joe McLaughlin, the state epidemiologist for Alaska. “We have cases and clusters being associated with a wide range of different settings.”
With two-thirds of the older population in Fairbanks having received at least one dose of a vaccine, those who have recently been hospitalized in Fairbanks are younger than the Covid patients during the winter, when there was a peak in case numbers. Dr. Creighton said people who were hospitalized in April tended to be in their 40s and 50s and were unvaccinated because they were waiting to see what side effects might come from receiving a Covid-19 vaccine.
“We are seeing them stay longer because they are not dying,” Dr. Creighton said. “We are giving them noninvasive ventilation and they are staying for two, three weeks and turning around, which I’ve never been more proud of.”
But while those older patients during the winter peak were largely grateful to be receiving care, those hospitalized now feel differently.
“Some of these folks are folks that are anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and they don’t believe they have Covid or are sick because of it, and our staff is getting pretty angry folks,” Shelley Ebenal, the chief executive of the health care system, Foundation Health Partners, said, imploring the system’s trustees to share their appreciation of the hospital staff with them.
She sounded a dire warning: “We are not out of Covid, and our staff in particular is not out of Covid. Our morale is really low.”
Thousands of foreign domestic workers lined up for mandatory testing in Hong Kong on Sunday after two were found to be infected with new coronavirus variants, a sweeping campaign that some governments and advocacy groups called discriminatory because it was targeting such a large population.
In addition to undergoing testing in the next week, migrant domestic workers must also be vaccinated before they can renew their contracts, according to new rules announced on Friday. Those who already completed their vaccinations more than two weeks ago were exempt from the new testing requirements.
Hong Kong has more than 370,000 foreign domestic workers, mostly women from the Philippines and Indonesia who often work long hours at low wages doing housework and caring for children and older adults. Under Hong Kong law, they are excluded from obtaining permanent residency rights, which are granted to most others after seven years in the city.
Advocates for the workers say that such exclusions make foreign domestic employees a permanent underclass in Hong Kong and that the testing and vaccination requirements are new examples of the prejudice they face.
The mandatory testing “is clearly an act of discrimination and stigmatization against migrant domestic workers,” Dolores Balladares-Pelaez, chairwoman of the advocacy group United Filipinos in Hong Kong, said at a news conference on Saturday. She said that in the case of other outbreaks in Hong Kong, such as a cluster of more than 130 cases that emerged from a high-end gym, testing orders were tailored far more narrowly.
Teodoro Locsin Jr., the foreign secretary of the Philippines, said on Twitter that Hong Kong’s mandatory vaccination requirement “smacks of discrimination” because it targets only a subsection of all foreign workers in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong officials have said that the testing requirements are strictly based on risk levels, and that foreign domestic workers’ regular social gatherings, plus the high transmissibility of the new strain, raise the risk of new outbreaks.
At a site on a basketball court on Hong Kong Island, hundreds of workers waited to be tested on Sunday afternoon. One of them, Mary Acapulco, 29, said she had received her second shot days earlier, too late to avoid the mandatory test.
Ms. Acapulco, who is from the Philippines and has spent five years working in Hong Kong, said she had resigned herself to spending her single day off this week being tested.
“I’m upset, of course. That’s why I got vaccinated,” she said. “But anyway, it is for safety.”
TOKYO — For Olympic host cities, one of the keys to a successful Games is the army of volunteers who cheerfully perform a range of duties, like fetching water, driving Olympic vehicles, interpreting for athletes or carrying medals to ceremonies.
If the rescheduled Tokyo Games go ahead as planned this summer, roughly 78,000 volunteers will have another responsibility: preventing the spread of the coronavirus, both among participants and themselves.
For protection, the volunteers are being offered little more than a couple of cloth masks, a bottle of sanitizer and mantras about social distancing. Unless they qualify for vaccination through Japan’s slow age-based rollout, they will not be inoculated against the coronavirus.
“I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do this,” said Akiko Kariya, 40, a paralegal in Tokyo who signed up to volunteer as an interpreter. The Olympic committee “hasn’t told us exactly what they will do to keep us safe.”
More than half of American states are reporting significant declines in coronavirus cases, but in Oregon, a new wave of the virus has pushed a third of the state’s counties to tighten lockdown restrictions.
Oregon is reporting about 816 new cases a day, a roughly 31 percent increase from two weeks ago, according to a New York Times database. Hospitalizations have also risen by about 42 percent in the same period. Deaths from the virus, which tend to lag behind cases for several weeks, remain relatively low.
“Here is the reality Oregon is facing right now: cases are widespread, driven by new, more contagious variants,” the state’s governor, Kate Brown, said at a news conference on Friday. “Oregon leads the nation for our rate of increase in cases over the last two weeks.”
A total of 15 counties, including some in the Portland metro area, moved back into the fourth and most extreme level of restrictions on Friday, after meeting the state’s threshold. In these counties, indoor dining is now prohibited and businesses such as gyms and movie theaters must significantly reduce their capacity.
The new limits are likely to prompt a political backlash. Some states that have seen recent surges, like in Michigan where cases have leveled off but total numbers still remain high, have chosen not to tighten restrictions again and instead have asked residents to take greater precautions in an effort to halt the spread of the virus.
Ms. Brown said she was optimistic that the state would be able to get ahead of the variants over the next two to three weeks, estimating that Oregon could lift statewide restrictions and return to some degree of normalcy by the end of June.
The governor urged Oregonians to get vaccinated, calling it the key to fully reopening the state’s economy.
Public health experts have suggested a combination of factors could be driving the surge, including more contagious variants, increased travel during spring break and the loosening of state guidelines before vaccination rates had sufficiently risen. As of Saturday, nearly 30 percent of the state’s population was fully vaccinated and 44 percent had received at least one dose, according to a New York Times vaccine tracker.
“We didn’t get down far enough,” Ken Stedman, a biology professor at Portland State University, told local news outlet KATU, referring to case numbers, “and now we seem to be going back up again.”
Across the United States, parents and graduates will confront commencements in May that are as atypical, modified and sometimes contentious as the past school year has been.
Each institution is making its own decision, and the result is an uneven landscape.
Harvard University announced that its seniors would graduate virtually and that their diplomas would be mailed to them. Just two miles away, Boston University will be hosting an in-person graduation.
With millions vaccinated, experts say that an increasing number of campuses are choosing to do in-person events. Campuses that are sticking to virtual-only ceremonies have become outliers, sometimes breeding frustration — and creativity.
When the University of Tampa decided to hold a virtual ceremony, Allison Clark, a senior, and two classmates started a GoFundMe drive and raised enough money to rent out a convention center for a do-it-yourself graduation.
“To be with my classmates, to walk across the stage, to receive the diploma that we all worked so hard for, it means absolutely everything,” she said.
The signs of New York City’s recovery are everywhere: Vaccinations are on the rise; restaurant and bar curfews are ending; occupancy restrictions are easing in offices, ballparks and gyms. By July 1, Mayor Bill de Blasio says the city should be “fully reopened.”
In this new and uncertain phase, the candidates vying to be the city’s next mayor are making radically different bets about the mood and priorities of New Yorkers, and how best to coax the city back to life. As the mayoral candidates barrel toward the June 22 Democratic primary, sharp distinctions are emerging around how to handle the city’s recovery.
A recent Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos poll found that 34 percent of likely Democratic primary voters viewed reopening businesses and the economy as the top priority for the next mayor, second only to stopping the spread of Covid-19 and closely followed by crime and public safety.
The challenge for all the candidates is to offer the right mix of experience and empathy, energy and vision, to engage a diverse electorate that experienced the coronavirus crisis and its fallout in very different ways.