Frontline worker in personal protective equipment (PPE) sprays a flammable liquid on a burning funeral of a man who died of coronavirus (COVID-19) at a crematorium on the outskirts of Mumbai, India, April 15 2021. REUTERS / Francis Mascarenhas / File Photo
Gas and firewood stoves at a crematorium in the western Indian state of Gujurat have been running uninterrupted for so long during the COVID-19 pandemic that metal parts have begun to melt.
“We work 24 hours a day with 100% ability to cremate bodies on time,” Kamlesh Sailor, president of the trust that runs the crematorium in the diamond-polishing city of Surat, told Reuters.
And with hospitals full of oxygen and drugs failing in an already cracked health system, several major cities are reporting far greater cremations and burials under coronavirus protocols than the official COVID-19 death toll, according to crematorium and cemetery workers, media and a review of government data .
India on Monday recorded a record 273,810 new daily infections and 1,619 deaths. The total number of cases now stands at more than 15 million, the second next to the United States.
Reliable data is at the heart of any government response to the pandemic, without which planning for hospital vacancies, oxygen and medicine will become difficult, experts say.
Government officials say the disparity in death rates could be caused by several factors, including excessive caution.
A senior state health official said the increase in the number of cremations was due to bodies cremated with COVID protocols, even though the person is likely to be positive by 0.1%.
“In many cases, patients come to the hospital in an extremely critical condition and die before being tested. There are cases where patients are brought to the hospital dead, and we do not know if they are positive or not,” the official said. .
‘VERY IRKSOME’
But Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan, said many parts of India are ‘data denial’.
“Everything is so muddy,” she said. “It feels like no one understands the situation very clearly, and it’s very troublesome.”
In Surat, Gujarat’s second largest city, Sailor’s Kurukshetra Crematorium and a second crematorium known as Umra, over the past week more than 100 bodies have been cremated per day under COVID protocols, far more than the city’s official daily COVID mortality rate of about 25, according to until interviews with workers.
Prashant Kabrawala, trustee of Narayan Trust, which runs a third city crematorium called Ashwinikumar, did not want to receive the number of bodies received according to COVID protocols, but said the cremations there had tripled in recent weeks .
“I have been going to the crematorium regularly since 1987 and have been involved in its daily functioning since 2005, but I have not seen so many dead bodies that would be cremated in all the years, even during an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1994. and floods in 2006.
Government spokesmen in Gujurat did not respond to requests for comment.
India is not the only country questioning its coronavirus statistics. But the testimony of workers and a growing body of academic literature suggest that deaths in India are underreported compared to other countries.
Mukherjee’s investigation into India’s first wave concludes that there were 11 times more infections than reported, according to estimates from studies in other countries. There were also between two and five times as many deaths as reported, far more than the world average.
WORKING DAY AND NIGHT
In Lucknow, capital of the populous northern state of Uttar Pradesh, data from the largest crematorium that only COVID, Baikunthdham, has, the number of bodies arriving on six different days in April, as government data on COVID deaths for the whole city.
The figures do not take into account a second crematorium that is only COVID in the city, or funerals in the Muslim community that make up a quarter of the city’s population.
Azad, head of the crematorium, which mentions only one name, said the number of cremations under COVID protocols has increased fivefold in the past few weeks.
“We work day and night,” he said. “The incinerators work full time, but still many people with the corpses have to wait for the last rituals.”
A Uttar Pradesh government spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Elsewhere, India Today reports two crematoria in Bhopal, the capital of central Madhya Pradesh, 187 bodies were cremated in four days this month according to COVID protocols, while the official COVID death toll stands at five.
Last week, Sandesh, a Gujarati newspaper, counted 63 bodies that left a single COVID hospital for burial in the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad, on a day on which government data showed 20 coronavirus deaths. has.
The medical journal Lancet noted last year that four Indian states that account for 65% of COVID deaths have each registered 100% of their deaths in coronavirus.
But less than a quarter of deaths in India are medically certified, especially in rural areas, which means that the true COVID death rate in many of the 24 other countries in India may never be known.
“Most deaths are unregistered, so it is impossible to do a validity calculation,” Mukherjee said.
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