India has recorded a new world record for daily coronavirus cases as the hospital system struggles to cope.
Nearly one million infections have been reported there in three days, with 346,786 new cases overnight into Saturday.
Another 2,624 deaths, a new daily record, were reported in 24 hours.
Almost 190,000 coronavirus-related deaths have been confirmed in India since the pandemic began, in addition to 16.5 million cases.
People were dying on the pavement outside one of the biggest hospitals in the Indian capital, Delhi, as medics struggled to cope with the country's dwindling supplies of oxygen amid a massive second surge in coronavirus cases.
Doctors across the country have been reduced to begging for help on social media warning of desperately low oxygen supplies.
The government has been heavily criticised for not taking the prospect of a second wave a lot more seriously.
Several political rallies went ahead in the past few weeks as well as the hugely popular Kumbh Mela religious festival which is held every 12 years and attracts an estimated 10 million devotees.
Burning pyres of COVID-19 deceased persons at a crematorium. Photo by Amarjeet Kumar Singh / SOPA Images/Sipa USAJot Jeet, chair of a disaster management cell with an organisation helping in New Delhi, described the situation in India as a medical disaster.
"The medical system has collapsed here," he told Newstalk Breakfast with Susan Keogh.
"You would not get beds in the hospitals, there's no admission for people in the hospitals.
"People are being bribed for providing beds, there is no oxygen available, COVID-19 patients are dying because there's no oxygen available in the hospitals.
"People are also dying in quarantine, in home isolation, because no medical facility has been provided by the government to the people, so it's a total medical collapse now.
Mr Jeet said the situation in the country has been converted from a "simple emergency" to "a disaster" because the Indian government weren't prepared.
He continued: "There's a shortage of beds in the hospitals, no oxygen, no injections, no medicines.
"Once people die, in the hospitals there's no availability for the morgues so people are lying on the roads, there are COVID-positive dead bodies, there are no funeral vans to carry the bodies to cemeteries.
"Once the person reaches the cemetery, there's a long queue that you need to wait six to eight hours to cremate just one dead body of a loved one.
"People are carrying dead bodies in private cars, there's a total collapse in Delhi right now."
A man who tested positive for COVID-19 is taken to a critical care unit at a hospital in Kolkata, India. Photo: Debarchan Chatterjee/ZUMA Wire)The surge in cases has been attributed by some to the "double mutant" strain of the virus circulating in India.
However, Jot Jeet says there is another reason behind the emergency situation.
"The only problem I found at the ground level is we got one year to prepare for this emergency, we got one year to prepare for the COVID-19 second wave," he explained.
"There was a sort of lax attitude from the government, the government did not pay heed to disaster preparedness.
"Just in Delhi, where the population is over 20 million, there's not a single oxygen plant here that can produce oxygen, that's a big failure.
"If you talk about hospitals, not a single hospital has been opened in Delhi that could cater to the COVID-19 patients or is designated to COVID-19 patients.
"That's a total failure, that's a total collapse, and I must say, if we prepared for the disaster during the one year that we got, we could have saved those lives.
"People who are dying here are not dying because of COVID-19, they're dying because of the mismanagement of the health system here in Delhi."
