“The situation is beyond crisis point,” said Dr Zarir Udwadia, who works in two of Mumbai’s biggest private hospitals, on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday. “This virus has a country of 1.4 billion firmly in a stranglehold and it’s really exposed our threadbare healthcare system and our failure of leadership.”

Dr Udwadia said he’s seeing “ward after ward full of patients struggling to breathe,” and that more younger patients are afflicted this time compared to the first wave of the virus. Just this week he watched a 35-year-old husband and wife who had been on ventilators die from the disease.

The pace of India’s vaccine rollout is also slow – less than 10% of the country has received an initial vaccine so far (by contrast, the UK government claims all adults will have been offered a first dose by the end of July).

Since January, India had been an important worldwide exporter of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, but a “temporary” halt on all exports was imposed in late March due to rising domestic demand. Among those receiving vaccine doses from India were the UK, Brazil and 74 other countries.

“In an act of largesse we’ve been donating vaccines to our neighbours without doing the maths – this country needs 2 billion doses at the very least,” Dr Zarir Udwadia said. “There was initial vaccine hesitancy [and] vaccine scepticism, like there is in many parts of Europe, but now there is vaccine desperation.”

In response to the crisis, the UK has sent help in the form of ventilators and oxygen concentrator devices, while the US is lifting a ban on sending raw materials abroad to enable India to make more of the AstraZeneca vaccine. However, the international aid effort amounts to “a drop in the ocean” that will “have a limited impact,” according to Dr Udwadia.

Covid-19: what you need to know about India’s deadly second wave of coronavirus