A patient is taken to a COVID-19 ward in a hospital, in Bangalore, India, April 30, 2021. India's federal health ministry said on Friday morning that 386,452 new cases and 3,498 related deaths were registered in the past 24 hours across the country.(Photo: Xinhua)

The coronavirus continues to spread in India as the country's caseload reached the 20-million mark, with doctors calling for a nationwide lockdown to contain new variants of COVID-19's spread.

Neeraj Ravishankar, a doctor based in Cochin, southern India's Kerala state, told the Global Times that it will take a complete lockdown to overcome the pandemic in India. 

"The only way is to enforce strict and complete lockdown for one month and vaccinate all the citizens to achieve complete herd immunity," he told the Global Times after finishing a longtime shift on Tuesday.

The COVID-19 surge in the country, which was mainly aggravated by ­massive religious gatherings, has highlighted the high infection rates of the coronavirus, which has claimed more than 3.2 million lives worldwide.

A video featuring Ravishankar was trending on China's twitter-like social media platform Sina Weibo over the May Day holiday with more than 3.2 million viewers, as he used his fluent Chinese to introduce the anti-COVID-19 efforts in Cochin - which has received millions of good wishes online.

"I have to work every day. It's six to 12 hours for a day," said Ravishankar, who graduated from West China School of Medicine, Sichuan University in 2012.

Northern India remains the most hard-hit area in the country, with reports suggesting the region lacks medical oxygen that has strained all health systems. 

Kerala is the only state which does not lack medical oxygen because last year when the pandemic started, the state set up multiple new oxygen plants, according to Ravishankar. But now due to the exponential rise in cases, there is a scarcity of hospital beds, he noted.

Ravishankar said the daily cases in Kerala were limited from 6,000 to 8,000 during February, but now it has increased to about 35,000 to 39,000 per day.

"All other medical supplies are adequate… But as India is a country with a huge population, I'm terrified of a situation where everything goes awry," he said. 

On China's social media there are also some netizens taking advantage of India's coronavirus conditions, making inappropriate and even vicious jokes. Ravishankar ignores them.

"Having been in China for seven years, 98 percent of the people I met are the nicest and welcoming," he said. "There will always be online trolls like this who are cowards because they don't dare to speak out in person, so I choose to ignore them as everyone should."