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NEW DELHI — For a doctor, it was another 18-hour day trying to rescue patients who could not be saved. For a crematorium official, it was one more procession of victims. For the family of a young academic, it was a time to mourn their second loss to the virus this month.
India reported more than 4,500 deaths from COVID-19 on Wednesday for the prior 24 hours, the highest single-day death toll in any country since the pandemic began and a grim marker of the scale of the outbreak ravaging this nation of 1.3 billion people.
The previous high for daily fatalities in the pandemic, 4,400, occurred in the United States on Jan. 20, according to data from The Washington Post.