[While the official statistics on covid-19 deaths in India are devastating, they do not capture the full scope of the calamity. Crematorium figures, obituaries and death certificates have repeatedly indicated higher numbers of deaths in this wave of infections than are reflected in the data from local and national authorities.]
India reported more than 4,500
deaths from covid-19 on Wednesday for the prior 24 hours, the worst 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.
While the official statistics on
covid-19 deaths in India are devastating, they do not capture the full scope of
the calamity. Crematorium
figures, obituaries and death
certificates have repeatedly indicated higher numbers of deaths in
this wave of infections than are reflected in the data from local and national
authorities.
Deaths from covid-19 lag infections
by several weeks, and there are signs that after an exponential rise, the surge
in India appears to be moderating. The country has reported fewer than 300,000
new infections each day this week, still a large number but lower than the
record-shattering 414,000-plus daily cases recorded earlier this month.
In New Delhi, India’s capital, the
number of new cases has fallen sharply after more than a month of lockdown
measures. The slowing growth rate has helped ease the immense pressure on the
city’s hospitals, which were turning away patients and grappling with shortages
of oxygen earlier this month.
Yet the situation remains dire,
notably in rural areas, where the majority of Indians live and where health
care is scarce. In India’s vast hinterland, scores of people are dying
with covid symptoms without being tested. Hundreds of bodies have been found floating in the
Ganges River or buried in shallow graves near its banks.
Sanjeev Goyal, a civil servant with
the Defense Ministry, lost his 23-year-old wife, Nidhi Goyal, a teacher, to the
virus in April. The family found her a hospital bed in Delhi after a frantic
search, but when her condition turned critical, no ventilator was available,
Goyal said. She was six months pregnant.
Goyal returned to his small
ancestral village in the state of Bihar to immerse his wife’s ashes according
to tradition. The number of people complaining of fever, coughs and sore
throats in the village is on the rise, he said. But officially there are
no coronavirus cases there because “not even a single
person has been tested.”
He blames the Delhi authorities for
forcing him to search for a ventilator and criticized a lack of preparation by
the central government for the second wave. “I will carry this pain for the
rest of my life that I couldn’t see her face properly one last time,” Goyal
said.
The deadly surge has spurred anger
at the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who held election rallies and allowed a massive religious gathering to proceed
even as cases spiked. Modi last addressed the nation on the coronavirus crisis
on April 20. In recent days, he has talked about the need to help rural and
remote areas combat the pandemic.
“The challenge is huge, but our
morale is even bigger,” he told local officials
Tuesday. “. . . With spirit and resolve, we will
take the country out of this crisis.”
As India seeks to contain the wave
of cases, it is also grappling with a faltering vaccination program. The number of doses
administered in the country has tumbled in the past six weeks amid supply
shortages and an abrupt change in procurement policy.
Epidemiologists think that while the
rate of growth of new cases appears to be decreasing, the actual toll is far
larger. The true number of deaths could be anywhere from two to eight
times the government figures, experts say.
Shahid Jameel, a virologist and
professor at Ashoka University, noted
recently that under normal circumstances, India’s death rate is about
27,600 a day. If the official figures of about 4,000 covid-19 deaths a day were
accurate, he said, they would represent a 15 percent increase — not enough
to overwhelm crematoriums or to generate the harrowing scenes witnessed across
the country in recent weeks.
The country would not “see this
kind of mayhem” unless the number of bodies at crematoriums had doubled, Jameel
told the Indian Express newspaper.
The country’s death toll reflects
not just the rampant spread of the virus but also the strain
on a chronically weak health-care system. Coronavirus patients have died at
home because hospitals were full, as well as inside hospitals because
ventilators were unavailable. Hospitals have run
out of oxygen, with fatal consequences.
The Health Ministry reports the
prior day’s covid-19 fatalities each morning. For some, Tuesday’s more than
4,500 deaths were part of a now-familiar routine.
Mayur Rathod, a doctor overseeing
the treatment of coronavirus patients at Saroj Hospital in Delhi, began the day
at 8 a.m. He often doesn’t stop until the wee hours of the next morning. He
updates the availability of hospital beds every two hours, checks stocks of
oxygen and medicines and submits death reports to a government website. The
hospital reported three deaths Tuesday and seven Monday.
“We are mentally exhausted,” Rathod
said. “It is depressing to see patients dying in front of our eyes.”
About 500 miles away in the central
Indian city of Bhopal, Mamtesh Sharma, an official at one of the city’s
crematoriums, began the process of performing the final rites for dozens of
coronavirus patients. For more than a month, he has spent 14 hours a day
surrounded by the dead.
On Tuesday, his crematorium handled
more than 30 covid victims, including a prominent doctor and a wealthy
businessman. In normal times, such funerals would draw crowds of friends and
relatives. Instead, just four people accompanied each body and left quickly,
Sharma said. What he has seen in the past five weeks will haunt him for the
rest of his life, he said.
Back in Delhi, later in the
afternoon, about a dozen people gathered at a cemetery to bury Nabila Sadiq,
a beloved
38-year-old professor of women’s studies at Jamia Millia Islamia
University. Sadiq wrote on Twitter about her illness, which she said began with
“chills
and choked throat” on April 25. Early this month, her condition worsened.
“Any icu bed leads? For myself,” she
wrote.
Sadiq’s 76-year-old mother also was
hospitalized with covid-19, said Farid Khan, a businessman who assisted the
family in its search for medical care. The mother died 10 days ago, and Sadiq
died late Monday, Khan said. She is survived by her father and brother.
The situation in India is
“unimaginable,” Khan said. “Just pray for whatever we can salvage.”
Shams Irfan in Srinagar and Taniya
Dutta in New Delhi contributed to this report.
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