LIndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has proudly announced that he has gathered a sea of stomping, maskless faces at a political rally in West Bengal that he has “never seen such large crowds”. A mask was also noticeably absent in Modi’s face.
On the same day, India recorded 234,000 new cases of coronavirus and 1,341 deaths – and the numbers have continued to rise ever since.
The country has fallen into a tragedy of unprecedented magnitude. Nearly 1.6 million cases were registered within a week, bringing the total cases to more than 15 million. In just 12 days, the Covid positivity rate doubled to 17%, while in Delhi it reached 30%. Hospitals across the country have filled up to date, but this time it is mainly the little ones who take up the beds; in Delhi, 65% of cases are younger than 40 years.
While the unprecedented spread of the virus is partly to blame for a more contagious variant emerging in India, Modi’s government has also been accused of failing political leadership from above, with a lax attitude taken by the state and local leaders of all parties were followed. even health officials across the country, who in many months have falsely led people to believe that India has defeated Covid.
“Leadership across the country has not adequately proven that this was an epidemic that has not disappeared,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.
“The victory was declared prematurely and that even mood was communicated across the country, especially by politicians who wanted to get the economy going and wanted to return to a campaign. And that gave the virus a chance to rise again. ”
In West Bengal, where Modi’s government has refused to restrict the protracted state elections it wants to win its Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Modi and his Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah held their public meetings and routes in this week continued, even as queues of ambulances lined up outside hospitals across India. On Saturday, the same day as Modi’s protest, the state registered 7,713 new cases – the highest since the pandemic began. Three candidates running in the election have died as a result of the virus. By Sunday, #ModiMadeDisaster had started trending on Twitter.
Doctors at the front line broke down and spoke of the avalanche of dying Covid patients they could not treat due to lack of beds and inadequate preparation by the state and central government.
Dr Amit Thadhani, director of Niramaya Hospital in Mumbai, which only treats Covid patients, said he had already given warnings in February about a virulent second wave, but that they had been ignored. He said his hospital was now “full and if a patient is discharged, the bed will be filled within minutes”. Ten days ago, the oxygen no longer had oxygen, but alternative supplies were found just in time.
“There are people standing in line outside the hospital trying to get in and every day we call every 30 seconds from someone trying to get a bed,” Thadhani said. ‘Most of these calls are aimed at patients who are critically ill and do need hospital care, but there is not enough capacity, and so there are many deaths. Everyone is stretched to the limit. ”
Thadhani said the virus this time around is “much more aggressive and contagious” and is now mainly affecting young people. “Now it’s people in their twenties and thirties who are getting into very serious symptoms, and there are a lot of deaths among young people,” he said.
The ghostly blast of ambulance sirens rang almost incessantly over the capital. Inside the Lok Nayak Government Hospital in Delhi, the largest Covid facility in the capital, congested facilities and a shortage of oxygen cylinders, this meant there were two to a bed while patients outside waited for beds to air in the portable and in ambulances, as they stood after their cries along their sides. Some sat out of desperation with oxygen cylinders they had bought themselves. Others die in the hospital’s parking lot.
In Mumbai, which was the first city to be the heaviest of the second wave, Dr Jalil Parkar of Lilavati Hospital said that ‘the whole healthcare system has collapsed and that doctors are exhausted’.
“There is a shortage of beds, a shortage of oxygen, a shortage of drugs, a shortage of vaccines, a shortage of tests,” Parkar said.
‘Even though we’ve opened another wing for Covid, we still do not have nearly enough beds, so we had to put some patients in the corridors and we converted the basement into a triage area for Covid patients. We have people waiting in ambulances and wheelchairs outside the hospital, and sometimes they have to give oxygen. What else can we do? ”
Even those in the upper echelons struggled to find beds for their loved ones. Vijay Singh Kumar, the national transport minister and a BJP MP in the state of Uttar Pradesh, responded on Twitter with the plea: ‘Please help us, my brother needs a bed for corona treatment. Now there are no beds arranged in Ghaziabad. ”
Delhi Minister Arvind Kejriwal has announced a six-day shutdown to prevent the total collapse of the health system. “The Covid situation in Delhi is dark,” he said on Monday. More than 99% of the ICU beds in the capital were occupied that day and by Tuesday, several of the top hospitals in Delhi, all with hundreds of Covid patients, declared oxygen emergencies and warned that they had only hours of supplies left.
States like Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh are accused of obscuring the true death toll from coronavirus, with the number of corpses accumulating in hospitals far exceeding official death rates. Among the cities hardest hit in Uttar Pradesh was Lucknow, where 22-year-old Deepti Mistri – a mother of one who had no existing health conditions – was among the city’s dead after falling ill with Covid on April 14. has become.
Her uncle Saroj Kumar Pandey, an ambulance driver who raised her from an early age, said he was desperately trying to find a hospital bed for her when her oxygen level began to drop dangerously to below 50% two days later, but could not be found anywhere. what room.
“I realized that Deepti needed oxygen immediately, and then arranged a cylinder for her herself,” he said. ‘I put her with the oxygen in the back of a family member’s car while I went to a dozen private and government hospitals to get her a bed and a ventilator. But nowhere would take her. ‘
Finally, late on April 16, Pandey found a bed in a small six-bed private clinic in Lucknow. It was not a Covid hospital, but they agreed to take her one night to give oxygen while Pandey continued his search for a hospital bed. “We kept looking all night, but there was no bed or fan for her anywhere,” he said. ‘That morning the clinic discharged her at 5am, so we had no choice but to bring her home. Deepti died a few hours later because she did not have oxygen and hospital care. She must live today. ‘
Twitter and Facebook have become a devastating catalog of hundreds of thousands of urgent pleas for help in finding hospital beds, oxygen, plasma and brake desirivir, the drug used experimentally to treat Covid patients, which are in short supply in hospitals across the country.
The dead, meanwhile, continued to overload crematoria and cemeteries in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Delhi faster than could be cremated, and families waited days to cremate their loved ones. On Sunday, the largest cremation facility in Delhi, Nigambodh Ghat, has no more space, despite the fact that its funeral levels have doubled to more than 60.
State governments in Delhi and Mumbai tried to rebuild the temporary Covid facilities they had demolished months earlier, while the central government announced an improvement to the vaccination program, meaning anyone over the age of 18 would be eligible from 1 May . a shortage of supplies remains a problem.
An edict of the government ruled that all oxygen intended for industrial use would now be taken to hospitals to meet the unprecedented demand, and Indian Railways said they all had to run special trains specially designed to liquefy to carry oxygen and oxygen cylinders, which the Oxygen Express ”. Thousands of Covid beds were also arranged in train carriages.
Yet many fear that it is too little, too late. “The seriousness of the situation had to be realized months ago, but governments were denied and handed out messages that the virus is no longer as dangerous,” Thadhani said. “I’m worried we haven’t seen the worst yet.”
Mohammad Sartaj Alam reported