社評：印度疫情面臨失控，凸顯國際合作重要性丨Too early to relax

A woman with a breathing problem waits to receive oxygen support for free at a Gurudwara (Sikh temple), amidst the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Ghaziabad, India, on April 24, 2021. Picture taken April 24, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]

As of 8 am on Saturday, India had registered 346,786 new novel coronavirus infections over the preceding 24 hours, the third day the daily figure was over 300,000. The number of daily deaths attributed to the virus reached more than 2,600 on Friday. In all, more than 16 million people in India have been infected so far.

Thanks to a lack of oxygen and beds, most hospitals in India cannot admit any infected patients no matter how serious their conditions are. In other words, its healthcare system has collapsed.

How can India be in such a horrible state? It claimed earlier this year that it had basically brought the virus under control. It is obvious that the Indian government underestimated how infectious the virus is and how rapidly it can spread.

Some large scale religious activities were held in India without requiring participants to wear masks or adopt effective prevention and control measures. It took less than two months for the daily increase in the number of infections to increase from about 10,000 to more than 300,000, a rate faster than that in the United States during the worst period of its struggle with the virus.

Meanwhile, Japan's daily increase in infections surpassed 5,000 for three consecutive days from Tuesday to Thursday.

As of Saturday, the accumulated number of infections worldwide had reached 145 million, and the death toll was more than 3 million, according to the statistics of Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

Yet despite this, some European countries have announced that they intend to lift their prevention and control measures as nearly one-fourth of the adults in European Union countries have been vaccinated.

However, new variants of the virus have appeared in India and have proved to be highly infectious. The risk of the virus being brought into the European countries from India is high. It is still unknown whether the vaccines that are being administered in many countries are effective against these variants.

It is far too early to be optimistic about the herd immunity the increasingly higher rate of vaccination will hopefully build in the EU countries and elsewhere. It is necessary for as many people as possible to be vaccinated. But control and prevention measures are still more than necessary.

In addition, international aid in whatever forms are not only necessary but also urgent for India to contain the spread of the virus as early as possible. A single country's loss of control over the pandemic will likely cause another regional surge in infections and possibly lead to another wave of the pandemic worldwide.

China has already expressed its willingness to provide India with whatever help it needs. It is hoped that more countries will do the same. The pandemic needs to be brought under control globally.