A front-line worker in personal protective equipment (PPE) sprays a flammable liquid on a flaming funeral fire of a man who died of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at a crematorium on the outskirts of Mumbai, India, 15 April 2021. REUTERS / Francis Mascarenhas / Photo File
Gas and firewood furnaces at a crematorium in the western Indian state of Gujurat operated so much without a break during the COVID-19 pandemic that metal parts began to melt.
“We are working non-stop at a 100% capacity to cremate the bodies on time,” Kamlesh Sailor, chairman of the diamond-polished crematorium in Surat, told Reuters.
And 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 between death decisions can 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.
“VERY FUR”
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 the second crematorium known as Umra incinerated more than 100 bodies a day under COVID protocols in the last week, well above the official daily figure of COVID, about 25, in interviews with workers.
Prashant Kabrawala, an administrator of the Narayan Trust, which runs a third crematorium called Ashwinikumar, declined to provide the number of bodies received under COVID protocols, but said incineration there had tripled in recent weeks.
“I’ve been going to the crematorium regularly since 1987 and I’ve been involved in its day-to-day operation since 2005, but I haven’t seen so many corpses coming to cremation all these years,” even during a bubonic plague outbreak in 1994 and the floods in 2006.
Gujurat government spokesmen 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 number of academic literature suggests that deaths in India are under-reported compared to other countries.
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.
WORKING DAY AND NIGHT
In Lucknow, the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, data from COVID’s largest exclusive crematorium, Baikunthdham, show twice the number of bodies arriving on six different days in April than government data on COVID deaths for the entire city.
The figures do not take into account a second COVID-only crematorium in the city or funerals in the Muslim community that make up a quarter of the city’s population.
The head of the Azad crematorium, which has only one name, said the number of cremations under 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, India Today reported two crematoria in Bhopal, the capital of central Madhya Pradesh, 187 bodies were cremated under COVID protocols in four days this month, while the official death toll of COVID 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 mortality rate from COVID 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.
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