“We are working non-stop at 100% capacity to cremate the bodies on time,” Kamlesh Sailor, president of the Gujarat crematorium in the city of Surat, with diamond polishing, told Reuters.
With hospitals full of oxygen and small amounts of drugs in an already squeaky health system, several major cities report a much higher incineration and burial according to coronavirus protocols than the official Covid-19 death toll, according to workers , the media and the cemetery. a review of government data.
India recorded a record 273,810 new daily infections and 1,619 deaths on Monday. Its total number of cases now stands at over 15 million, second only to the United States.
Reliable data is at the heart of any government response to the pandemic, without which planning vacancies in hospitals, oxygen and medicine becomes difficult, experts say.
Government officials say the discrepancy in the number of deaths could be caused by several factors, including over-caution.
A senior state health official said the increase in the number of cremations was caused by the incineration of bodies using Covid protocols “even though there is a 0.1% probability that the person will be positive”.
“In many cases, patients come to the hospital in an extremely critical condition and die before being tested, and 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.
“Refusal of data”
But Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan, said many parts of India are in “data denial.”
“Everything is so muddy,” she said. “It seems that no one understands the situation very clearly and that is very annoying.”
In Surat, the second largest city in Gujarat, the Sailor Kurukshetra crematorium and a second crematorium known as Umra cremated more than 100 bodies a day under the Covid protocols in the last week – much more than the number official deaths of the city around 25, according to interviews with workers.
Prashant Kabrawala, an administrator of the Narayan Trust, which operates a third city crematorium called Ashwinikumar, declined to provide the number of bodies received under Covid protocols, but said incineration there has tripled in recent weeks.
“I’ve been going to the crematorium regularly since 1987 and I’ve been involved in day-to-day operations since 2005, but I haven’t seen so many corpses coming for cremation all these years,” even during a 1994 bubonic plague outbreak. and the floods in 2006, Kabrawala said.
Government spokesmen did not respond to requests for comment.
Mukherjee’s research on India’s first wave concludes that there were 11 times more infections than reported, according to studies in other countries. There were also two to five times more deaths than reported, well above the global average.
Work day and night
In Lucknow, the capital of the populous northern state of Uttar Pradesh, data from Covid’s largest exclusive crematorium, Baikunthdham, show double the number of bodies arrived on six different days in April than government data on Covid’s deaths for the entire city.
The figures do not take into account a second Covid-only crematorium in the city or burials in the Muslim community that make up a quarter of the city’s population.
The head of the Azad crematorium, which bears only one name, said that the number of incinerations according to Covid protocols has increased fivefold in recent weeks.
“We work day and night,” he said. “Incinerators work full time, but many people still have to wait with the corpses for the last rites.”
A Uttar Pradesh government spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Elsewhere, local media India Today reported two crematoria in Bhopal, the capital of central Madhya Pradesh, 187 bodies were cremated according to Covid protocols in four days this month, while the official death toll Covid has was 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 when government data showed 20 coronavirus deaths.
The Lancet noted last year that four Indian states, accounting for 65 percent of Covid deaths nationwide, each reported 100 percent of coronavirus deaths.
But less than a quarter of deaths in India are medically certified, especially in rural areas, which means that the true Covid mortality rate in many of India’s 24 other states may never be known.
“Most deaths are not recorded, so it is impossible to make a validation calculation,” Mukherjee said.