India reports 132,788 new COVID-19 infections, 3,207 deaths

Bengaluru: India on Wednesday reported a daily rise in new coronavirus infections of 132,788 cases over the past 24 hours, while deaths rose by 3,207.

The South Asian nation’s tally of infections now stands at 28.3 million, while the death toll has reached 335,102, health ministry data showed.

Meanwhile, the highly-infectious COVID-19 variant first detected in India ‘threatens’ to rapidly spread in the sub-region, including among refugees, the UN refugee agency has said as it warned of vaccine shortages in the Asia-Pacific region, including for asylum-seekers.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesperson Andrej Mahecic, at a press briefing in Geneva on Tuesday, said that the fragile health systems in many countries in the Asia and Pacific region have struggled to cope with the recent surge of coronavirus cases.

“We are particularly worried about the situation in the Asia and Pacific region, which in the past two months has experienced the largest increase in the number of cases globally,” he said.

Over this period, there have been some 38 million recorded COVID-19 cases and more than half a million deaths, the UNHCR spokesperson said.

“The lack of hospital beds, oxygen supplies, limited Intensive Care Unit (ICU) capacities and scarce health facilities and services have worsened outcomes for those infected with COVID-19, particularly in India and Nepal. The highly infectious variant of the virus which first emerged in India threatens to rapidly spread in the sub-region, including among refugee populations,” Mahecic said.