ITReceiving a sea of masked, unarmed faces gathered at a political rally in West Bengal on Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi proudly proclaimed that “he has never seen such huge crowds.” A mask was also visibly missing from Modi’s face.
On the same day, India recorded a record 234,000 new coronavirus cases and 1,341 deaths – and the numbers have continued to rise since then.
The country has descended into a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. Almost 1.6 million cases were registered in one week, bringing the total number of cases to over 15 million. In just 12 days, Covid’s positivity rate has doubled to 17%, while in Delhi it has reached 30%. Hospitals across the country have been filled to the brim, but this time it is predominantly the young man who takes the beds; In Delhi, 65% of cases are under 40 years old.
While the unprecedented spread of the virus has been partly blamed on a more contagious variant that has emerged in India, the Modi government has also been blamed for failures of top political leadership, with lax attitudes emulated by state and local leaders. from all parties and even health officials across the country, which has led many to falsely believe in recent months that India has defeated Covid.
“Leadership across the country has not adequately conveyed that this was an epidemic that has not gone away,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.
“The victory was declared premature and this lively mood was communicated throughout the country, especially by politicians who wanted to start the economy and wanted to return to the campaign. And that gave the virus a chance to rise again. ”
In West Bengal, where Modi’s government has refused to cut the state elections the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hopes to win, Modi and his interior minister, Amit Shah, have continued their public meetings and performances this week. , even in the queues of ambulances lined up outside hospitals in India. On Saturday, the same day as Modi’s rally, the state registered 7,713 new cases – the largest since the pandemic began. Three candidates running in the elections died of the virus. By Sunday, #ModiMadeDisaster started trending on Twitter.
First-line doctors broke down, talking about the flood of dying Covid patients they could not treat due to lack of beds and inadequate training of the state and central government.
Dr. Amit Thadhani, the director of Niramaya Hospital in Mumbai, which treats only Covid patients, said he gave warnings about a second virulent wave in February, but they were ignored. He said his hospital was now “completely full and if a patient is discharged, the bed fills up in minutes.” Ten days ago, the hospital ran out of oxygen, but alternative supplies were found in time.
“There are people lined up outside the hospital trying to get in and every day we get calls every 30 seconds from someone trying to find a bed,” Thadhani said. Most of these calls are for patients who are seriously ill and need hospital care, but there is not enough capacity and so there is a lot of mortality. Everyone was pushed to their limits. ”
Thadhani said this time that the virus is “much more aggressive and more infectious” and now predominantly affects young people. “Now people in their 20s and 30s come with very severe symptoms and there is a lot of mortality among young people,” he said.
The haunting sound of ambulance sirens continued to ring over the capital almost non-stop. Inside Delhi’s Lok Nayak government hospital, the capital’s largest Covid facility, overcrowded facilities and a lack of oxygen cylinders meant there were two in bed, while outpatients waiting for beds panted for air on stretchers and in ambulances, while the crying relatives sat next to them. Some were sitting with the oxygen cylinders they had bought desperately. Others died waiting in the hospital parking lot.
In Mumbai, which was the first city to bear the brunt of the second wave, Dr. Jalil Parkar of Lilavati Hospital said that “the entire health system has collapsed and doctors are exhausted.”
“There is a lack of beds, a lack of oxygen, a lack of drugs, a lack of vaccines, a lack of tests,” Parkar said.
“Even though we opened another wing for Covid, we still don’t have almost enough beds, so we had to put a few patients in the corridors and we turned the basement into a sorting area for patients with Covid. We have people waiting in ambulances and wheelchairs outside the hospital and sometimes we have to give them oxygen there. What else can we do? ”
Even those in the upper echelons of power have struggled to find beds for their loved ones. Vijay Singh Kumar, the national transport minister and BJP MP in the state of Uttar Pradesh, turned to Twitter with the plea: “Please help us, my brother needs a bed for the treatment of the crown. There are currently no beds in Ghaziabad. ”
Announcing a six-day blockade to prevent a complete collapse of the health system, Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, did not lie. “Covid’s situation in Delhi is bleak,” he said on Monday. More than 99% of ICU beds in the capital were occupied that day, and by Tuesday, several of Delhi’s largest hospitals, all with hundreds of Covid patients, had declared oxygen emergencies, warning that they had only a few hours left. supplies.
States such as Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh are accused of covering the true number of deaths from coronavirus, with the number of corpses piled up in hospitals far exceeding official mortality figures. Among the most affected cities in Uttar Pradesh was Lucknow, where 22-year-old Deepti Mistri – a mother of one with no pre-existing health conditions – was among the city’s dead after she fell ill with Covid on April 14.
Her uncle Saroj Kumar Pandey, an ambulance driver who raised her as a child, said she desperately tried to find her a hospital bed when, two days later, her oxygen levels began to drop dangerously below. 50%, but could not find a room anywhere.
“I realized that Deepti needed oxygen right away, so I arranged a cylinder for her,” he said. “I put her behind the car of a relative with oxygen while I was going to a dozen private and government hospitals, trying to find her a bed and a ventilator. But he wouldn’t take her anywhere. ”
Finally, late at night on April 16, Pandey found her a bed in a small, six-bed private clinic in Lucknow. It wasn’t a Covid hospital, but they agreed to take it one night to give him oxygen, while Pandey continued his search for a hospital bed. “We kept looking all night, but nowhere did we have a bed or a fan for her,” he said. “In the morning, the clinic discharged her at 5 in the morning, so we had no choice but to bring her home. Deepti died a few hours later because he lacked oxygen and hospital care. He should be alive today. ”
Twitter and Facebook have become a devastating catalog of hundreds of thousands of urgent requests for help finding hospital beds, oxygen, plasma and remdesivir, the drug used experimentally to treat patients with Covid, which remains low in hospitals across the country.
Meanwhile, the dead continued to overwhelm crematoria and cemeteries in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Delhi faster than they could have been burned, and families waited days to cremate their loved ones. On Sunday, Delhi’s largest cremation facility, Nigambodh Ghat, ran out of space, despite the doubling of funeral pyres to over 60.
The state governments of Delhi and Mumbai have been working to rebuild the temporary Covid facilities they dismantled earlier Monday, while the central government has announced an improvement in the vaccination program, which would mean that anyone over the age of 18 years will be eligible from May 1, although lack of supply remains a problem.
A government edict has ruled that all oxygen for industrial use will now be redirected to hospitals to meet unprecedented demand, and Indian Railways said they are ready to operate special trains specifically designed to carry liquid oxygen and oxygen cylinders, nicknamed “Oxygen Express”. Thousands of Covid beds were also arranged in train carriages.
However, many fear that it is too little, too late. “The gravity of the situation should have been realized a few months ago, but instead the governments denied and sent messages that the virus is no longer so dangerous,” Thadhani said. “I’m worried I haven’t seen the worst yet.”
Mohammad Sartaj Alam contributed to the reporting