The News Roundup — International (The 1A) 2021-04-23

India has become the world’s new pandemic epicenter. Daily cases of COVID-19 in India have exploded since early March and the government reported 314,000 new infections on Thursday. India now accounts for one in three new cases of COVID-19 across the world.

From The Guardian:

Dr Amit Thadhani, director of Niramaya hospital in Mumbai, which is only treating Covid patients, said he had given warnings about a virulent second wave back in February but they had gone ignored. He said now his hospital was “completely full and if a patient gets discharged, the bed is filled within minutes”. Ten days ago, the hospital ran out of oxygen, but alternative supplies were found just in time.

“There are people lined up outside the hospital trying to get in and every day we are getting calls every 30 seconds from someone trying to find a bed,” said Thadhani. “Most of these calls are for patients who are critically ill and do need hospital care but there just isn’t enough capacity and so there is a lot of mortality happening. Everyone has been stretched to their limit.”

Russian opposition icon Alexei Navalny is reportedly close to death following a hunger strike. Some 1,700 protesters were arrested following demonstrations in support of Navalny.

And historians are concerned after a wildfire ruined parts of a library in Cape Town, South Africa that held key archives of African history.

From The New York Times:

The wildfire is the latest in a series of devastating mountain blazes that have swept through the Western Cape province in recent years. But the fallout from this fire was also felt across the region after towers of orange and red flames devoured Cape Town University’s special collections library — home to one of the most expansive collections of first-edition books, films, photographs and other primary sources documenting Southern African history.

By Sunday evening, a special-collections reading room at the university’s library had been gutted by the blaze, according to university officials. The reading room housed parts of the university’s African Studies Collection, which includes works on Africa and South Africa printed before 1925, hard-to-find volumes in European and African languages and other rare books, according to Niklas Zimmer, a library manager at the university.

Interview: 

https://the1a.org/segments/india-covid-navalny/