India reported 346,786 new cases of Covid-19 on Saturday — the third day in a row the country has set a world record for infections during the coronavirus pandemic, according to government and scientific tallies.

The related death toll for the previous 24 hours hit 2,624 — also a daily record for India — for 189,544 total fatalities.

The sky-rocketing Covid-19 infections are devastating India’s communities and hospitals. Everything is in short supply — intensive care unit beds, medicine, oxygen and ventilators. Bodies are piling up in morgues and crematoriums.

Indira Baldano, naive art Индира Балдано живопись

Twenty critically ill patients died at a Delhi hospital Friday night after its supply of oxygen was delayed by seven hours, according to Dr. DK Baluja, medical director at the Jaipur Golden Hospital.

“That happened last night. Everything we had was exhausted. The oxygen was not supplied on time. It was supposed to come in at 5 p.m. but it came around midnight. People who were critically ill needed oxygen,” said Baluja.

The hospital is currently scrambling to arrange more oxygen but has not received a fresh supply all Saturday morning. “We have only 15-20 minutes of oxygen left now. It may take hours to get another tanker,” Baluja told CNN.

Delhi hospitals have been facing a severe oxygen shortage as the number of Covid-19 cases have soared in the national capital in the past two weeks….

Delhi recorded 24,331 new cases Friday, including 348 deaths, according to the Covid-19 health bulletin issued by the Delhi government.

Countrywide, India has now recorded more than 16.6 million cases since the start of the pandemic, a CNN tally of figures from the Indian Ministry of Health reveals.

In contrast, Vietnam successfully limited the spread of the virus. The Verge: Vietnam defied the experts and sealed its border to keep Covid-19 out. It worked.

As the pandemic took hold last year, travel restrictions quickly proliferated — they were the second-most-common policy governments adopted to combat Covid-19. According to one review, never in recorded history has global travel been curbed in “such an extreme manner”: a reduction of approximately 65 percent in the first half of 2020. More than a year later, as countries experiment with vaccine passports, travel bubbles, and a new round of measures to keep virus variants at bay, a maze of confusing, ever-changing restrictions remains firmly in place.

But few countries have gone as far as Vietnam, a one-party communist state with a GDP per capita of $2,700. The Haiphong checkpoints timed for Tet were the equivalent of closing off Los Angeles to Americans ahead of Thanksgiving — within a country that was already nearly hermetically sealed. Last March, the government canceled all inbound commercial flights for months on end, making it almost impossible to fly in, even for Vietnamese residents.

Today, flights are limited to select groups, like businesspeople or experts, from a few low-risk countries. Everybody who enters needs special government permission and must complete up to 21 days of state-monitored quarantine with PCR tests. (Positive cases are immediately isolated in hospitals, regardless of disease severity.)

This strict approach to travel, global health experts say, is directly connected to Vietnam’s seeming defeat of Covid-19. Thirty-five people have reportedly died in total, and a little more than 2,700 have been infected with the virus during three small waves that have all been quickly quashed. Even on the worst days of the pandemic, the country of 97 million has never recorded more than 110 new cases — a tiny fraction of the 68,000 daily case high in the United Kingdom, which has a population one-third smaller than Vietnam, or the record 300,000-plus cases per day only the US and India managed to tally.

Paula Modersohn-Becker (German, 1876 – 1907) Cat held by a child

Finally, The Daily Beast addresses the crazy anti-vaxxer situation: The Anti-Vaxxer Hunt for Dead People Is Getting Even Weirder.

Starting in mid-January, several social media channels and websites emerged as hubs for stories, generated by admins and users pulling together snippets from across the internet and crafting them into cohesive narratives and brief posts, linking reported deaths to COVID vaccinations. Several of these platforms have grown notably, and become more formalized, in recent weeks. Unsurprisingly, given the robust safety profile of the vaccines in use in the United States, they rarely detail how a vaccination supposedly caused a given death.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not found a causal connection between COVID vaccines and virtually any post-vaccination deaths—although the agency recently announced it is investigating three deaths linked to a rare blood-clotting disorder a few individuals developed after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Medical authorities shelved that vaccine temporarily because sensitive monitoring systems picked up on this issue quickly. However, anti-vaxxers often take this less as a sign that safety systems are working and more as a sign that they were right all along and many more dangers must remain hidden.

But even if the narratives these hubs string together are weak and not supported by extant research on vaccine risks, some evidence suggests seeing these sorts of stories repeated ad nauseam may turn otherwise open people away from vaccines. This is a problem, as experts warn that skeptics, especially in far-right strongholds, are holding us back from herd immunity.

And death-hunting hubs are overflowing with dubious stories about vaccine death. 

“People from all over the world send us the leads,” Brian A. Wilkins, a freelance writer who runs a site called The COVID Blog, which publishes pandemic misinformation and conspiracy theories, told The Daily Beast. (The blog has a “Vaccine Deaths” category, but Wilkins insists he only uses the term “for SEO purposes”; he, like many skeptics, falsely insists coronavirus vaccines are not real vaccines, and should properly be called experimental genetic therapies.) “I cannot even keep up,” he added. “I’m at least 70 stories behind.”

Some of these “leads” are local media reports that provocatively note someone got vaccinated and died days or weeks later—but never establish a firm causal link between the two. Others are social media posts describing people getting vaccinated, then dying suddenly or after an illness, either right after getting their shots or weeks later. Some are little more than loose digital chatter and speculation.