PARIS: The world hit a new daily record of coronavirus cases due mainly to an explosion of the virus in India, but Covid jabs also approached one billion globally on Saturday, offering hope after months of pandemic misery.

Cases topped 893,000 worldwide on Friday, with more than a third of the infections in India. Authorities there announced 332,730 new cases on Friday and another 346,786 on Saturday, also a record for a single country since the start of the pandemic, according to a count.

India also reported another 2,624 deaths, taking the official toll to nearly 190,000 since the pandemic started.

India has become the new pandemic hotspot — queues of Covid-19 patients and their fearful relatives have built up outside hospitals in major cities — and acute shortages of oxygen have been reported from all over the country.

A surge blamed on a new virus variant and recent “super spreader” public events has wrought devastation on the country of 1.3 billion, with charities forced to set up makeshift funeral pyres in a bid to reduce the strain on crematoriums.

Indian social media and WhatsApp are white-hot with volunteer calls for vacant ICU beds and medicine, and the central government is scrambling to organise special trains to get oxygen supplies to worst-hit cities.

One ‘oxygen express’ carrying 30,000 litres of oxygen arrived in Lucknow, in Uttar Pradesh state, at dawn on Saturday, where armed guards were waiting to escort trucks to hospitals.

The Indian air force is also being used to transport oxygen tankers and other supplies around the country and to bring oxygen equipment from Singapore.

The grim scenes out of India were in stark contrast to the quickening vaccine rollouts in much of the western world, with US regulators approving the restart of a rollout of Johnson & Johnson vaccines halted over blood clotting concerns.

The number of jabs is approaching one billion worldwide, according to a count based on official statistics.

Published in Dawn, April 25th, 2021