Dusk Falls
Covid-19 in India
By Maya Herne and Arabella Johns
As Dusk falls and clouds of smoke from burning bodies fills the air, you walk past a local crematorium noticing that you see several funeral pyres are still burning, and remark to yourself that you have never seen so many bodies burning together.
Funeral pyres of COVID-19 victims are being burned in a lot that has been converted into a crematorium in New Delhi.
Image: CC The Guardian
This may sound like a piece written for a post- apocalyptic fiction novel, yet for many Indians this is their reality.
It appears that now, as we have no cases in Tasmania and restrictions have relaxed (apart from Melbourne), that Covid-19 is not something that many of us think about too often. This may be the case for us, but many other places are not as fortunate, one of those being India.
The country is experiencing the world's worst outbreak, with new cases surging past 400,000 per day and breaking the record for the highest single-day figure globally.
The second wave started in early March, when infections began creeping upward before rapidly accelerating. By the start of April, the number of daily cases had jumped up to six times that of which was recorded in May. That exponential rise has continued into May.
As of today, India accounts for one in three of the reported deaths from coronavirus around the world, according to a Reuters tally. The outbreak there is overwhelming hospital and medical staff as hospitals have run out of basic medical supplies, and are having to turn down patients because they just do not have the resources to take them in.
Photographer Hitesh Rathod took this picture of ambulances queued up outside the government hospital (“The Economics Forum 21”).
“Family members are driving from clinic to clinic, frantically searching for open ICU beds for their loved ones”(editioncnn.com). Hospitals across Delhi are reporting fatal oxygen shortages. Eight people, including a doctor, died at a New Delhi hospital after the facility ran out of oxygen on May 1. The same problem saw 20 critically ill patients die at another hospital on April 23. Battling to find hospital beds, distraught people are flooding social media and messaging apps with pleas for oxygen, medicines, and room in intensive care units.
Its deadly second wave has, apart from swamping the nation’s healthcare system, overwhelmed the capacity of cremation and burial sites to cope with the sheer volume of bodies. “Photos show grieving families dressed in full protective suits at mass cremations, performing last rites surrounded by dozens of other burning funeral pyres” (CNN-Breaking News, Latest News and Videos). Space is so short for the Covid-19 dead, that makeshift sites in backyards, public parks and even the shores of the River Ganges have been inundated in Uttar Pradesh state.
Tragically, the nation’s recording of more than 300,000 coronavirus deaths and 27 million cases, making it the world epicentre of the pandemic, does not seem to be slowing anytime soon. What is worse is that the media has been accused of censoring the true extent of the suffering. “Experts believe reported figures are an undercount, but it is unclear by how much” (www.aljazeera.com).
To combat this the Indian government has increased testing and put in place a vaccine roll out plan that allows anyone over the age of 18 to register for the jab, although the demand cannot be kept up with and the roll out has slowed due to shortages in supplies to administer despite India producing the largest number of vaccines in the world.
To put pressure on the Australian government to support the move, more than 700 health professionals and academics have sent an open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison urging him to help remove legal and technical barriers that are limiting the production of COVID-19 vaccines. The letter, signed by 207 doctors, 177 academics and 111 public health professionals calls on Mr Morrison to take a leadership role in accelerating the rollout of vaccines so repeated outbreaks can be contained and the emergence of new variants addressed.
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