NEW DELHI: A weekend curfew began in India’s capital New Delhi and several other regions on Saturday as the country is bracing for a third wave of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases amid a rapid surge in new infections fueled by the omicron variant. Indian health authorities recorded nearly 142,000 new COVID-19 cases on Saturday, a tenfold increase from last week, bringing the country’s tally to over 3.5 million. The death toll increased to over 483,400 with 285 fatalities reported in the last 24 hours. Delhi alone registered over 20,000 new cases on Saturday, the highest number since the beginning of May, when a deadly second wave of the virus wreaked havoc in the country. At least 178,000 people died of COVID-19 between March and May 2020, when an outbreak of the delta variant paralyzed India’s medical infrastructure. The even faster spreading omicron variant, first detected in South Africa in November, has now overtaken in India the previously dominant delta strain. Besides Delhi, weekend curfews have also been imposed in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu state, and in Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka, where the number of new cases has jumped from about 800 to over 6,800 since last week. “The weekend curfew is important because people have become very careless. People think that since they are vaccinated, they will not get infected,” Dr. Rama V. Baru of the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi told Arab News on Saturday. She said people are “forgetting the bitter memory of the second wave.” “The public health system is fatigued,” Baru added. “A two-day curfew, one may presume, will reduce transmission. The government doesn’t want a situation in which the health system gets overwhelmed.” Dr. Adarsh Pratap Singh from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi said that 66 out 100 patients who have undergone COVID-19 screening have tested positive for the virus. “The number of patients is increasing, and if many of them require hospitalization, we are not equipped because it would be difficult to manage the huge population,” he told Arab News. “We are still unaware of how the new omicron variant is going to behave. We should be prepared for the worst situation, and we have to build our infrastructure accordingly.” He also said more health workers need to join hospitals to address the COVID-19 surge. India has one of the worst doctor-to-patient ratios in the world — just 1 to 1,456. About 45,000 junior doctors are expected to join the medical workforce soon, after the Supreme Court on Friday cleared their admission process to practice at government health facilities. The admissions were stalled for months by legal disputes, prompting practicing doctors to go on a month-long strike from early December until last week amid fears that a looming third wave could overwhelm understaffed medical facilities.