People swallowing viruses in India; Crematoria overwhelmed

Tacoma

NEW DELHI (AP) – With a lack of life-saving oxygen, families with COVID-19 must move sick people from hospital to hospital in search of treatment as a devastating wave of infections rises across India. Too often their efforts end in grief.

Desperate relatives plead for oxygen on social media and on television outside of hospitals or cry in the street for loved ones waiting for treatment.

One woman mourned her younger brother at the age of 50. He was turned away from two hospitals and died after being seen at a third. He gasped after his oxygen tank was empty and there were no more replacements.

She blamed the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the crisis.

“He set stakes on fire in every house,” she exclaimed in a video shot by The Caravan magazine.

For the fourth year in a row, India set a global daily record for new coronavirus infections on Sunday, triggered by an insidious new variant that appeared here. The surge has undermined the government’s premature claims to victory over the pandemic.

The 349,691 new infections brought India’s total to more than 16.9 million, just behind the United States. The Ministry of Health reported an additional 2,767 deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing India’s deaths to 192,311.

The death toll could be very high as suspected cases are not taken into account and many COVID-19 deaths are due to the underlying conditions.

The spreading crisis is worst in India’s overcrowded cemeteries and crematoria and in heartbreaking images of wheezing patients dying of oxygen deprivation on their way to hospitals.

The tombs in the capital New Delhi have run out of space. Bright, glowing pyres light up the night skies in other hard-hit cities.

In downtown Bhopal, some crematoria have increased their capacity from dozen of pyrenees to over 50. However, there are still hours of waiting.

At the city’s Bhadbhada Vishram Ghat crematorium, workers said they cremated more than 110 people on Saturday, although government figures across the city of 1.8 million put the total virus deaths at just 10.

“The virus is swallowing people in our city like a monster,” said Mamtesh Sharma, a local official.

The unprecedented onslaught of bodies has forced the crematorium to skip individual ceremonies and exhausting rituals that Hindus believe will free the soul from the cycle of rebirth.

“We only burn bodies when they arrive,” said Sharma. “It’s like we’re in the middle of a war.”

The gravedigger at New Delhi’s largest Muslim cemetery, where 1,000 people were buried during the pandemic, said more bodies are arriving now than last year. “I’m afraid we will run out of space very soon,” said Mohammad Shameem.

Equally grim is the situation in excruciatingly crowded hospitals, where desperate people die in line, sometimes in the streets outside, waiting to see doctors.

Health officials are struggling to expand intensive care units and replenish dwindling oxygen supplies. Hospitals and patients alike struggle to source scarce medical equipment that is being sold on the black market at an exponential premium.

The drama stands in direct contrast to government claims that “no one in the country has been left without oxygen,” India’s Attorney General Tushar Mehta told the Delhi Supreme Court on Saturday.

The collapse is a major failure for a country whose prime minister declared victory over COVID-19 as recently as January and which boasted of being the “world’s pharmacy,” a global vaccine manufacturer and model for other developing countries.

Surprised by the recent fatal spike, the federal government has asked industrialists to increase the production of oxygen and other life-saving drugs. But health experts say India had a full year to prepare for the inevitable – and it didn’t.

Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, assistant professor of medicine in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina, said the government should have used the last year the virus was better under control to store drugs and develop systems to to counteract the probability of a new rise.

“Above all, they should have looked at what is going on in other parts of the world and understood that it is a matter of time before they find themselves in a similar situation,” said Kuppalli.

Instead, the government’s early declarations of victory encouraged people to relax if they should continue to maintain strict physical distance, wear masks, and avoid large crowds.

Modi has come under increasing criticism for allowing Hindu festivals and participating in mammoth election campaigns that experts suspect may have accelerated the spread of infections. At one such rally on April 17, Modi said he was delighted by the crowd, although experts warned that a fatal increase was inevitable as India is already counting 250,000 new cases a day.

Now, with the death toll rising, his nationalist Hindu government is trying to quell critical voices.

On Saturday, Twitter complied with the government’s request, preventing people in India from seeing more than 50 tweets that appeared to criticize the government’s handling of the pandemic. Targeted posts include tweets from opposition ministers criticizing Modi, journalists and common Indians.

A Twitter spokesperson said he had authority “to deny access to the content only in India” if the company found the content to be “illegal” in a particular jurisdiction. The company said it responded to a government order and notified people whose tweets were withheld.

The Indian Ministry of Information Technology did not respond to a request for comment.

Even with the targeted blocks, terrible scenes of overwhelmed hospitals and cremation sites spread on Twitter and called for help.

President Joe Biden said the US is determined to help. “Just as India sent aid to the US because our hospitals were congested at the start of the pandemic, we are determined to help India in its need,” Biden said in a tweet.

The White House said the US was “working around the clock” using test kits, ventilators and personal protective equipment, and was trying to provide oxygen as well. It said it would also provide sources of raw materials urgently needed to manufacture Covishield, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from the Serum Institute of India.

Help and support were also offered by arch rivals Pakistan, with politicians and citizens of the neighboring country expressing their solidarity. The Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it offers relief operations, including ventilators, oxygen kits, digital x-ray machines, PPE and related items.

“Humanitarian questions require answers that go beyond political considerations,” said Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi.

The Indian government did not immediately respond to Qureshi’s testimony.

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Hussain reported from Srinagar, India.