L.Gazing out over a sea of jostling, maskless faces gathered at a political rally in West Bengal on Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi proudly declared that he had “never seen such large crowds.” A mask was also noticeably absent from Modi’s face.
That same day, India recorded a record 234,000 new coronavirus cases and 1,341 deaths – and the number has continued to rise ever since.
The country has descended in a tragedy of unprecedented magnitude. Nearly 1.6 million cases were registered in a week, bringing the total to more than 15 million. In just 12 days, the Covid positivity rate doubled to 17%, while in Delhi it reached 30%. Hospitals across the country are full, but this time it is mainly the young who take up the beds; in Delhi, 65% of the cases are under the age of 40.
While the unprecedented spread of the virus is due in part to a more contagious variant that has surfaced in India, Modi’s government has also been accused of failing top political leadership, with lax attitudes emulated by state and local leaders of all parties and even health officials across the country, leading many to falsely believe in recent months that India had defeated Covid.
“Leadership across the country did not make it sufficiently clear that this was an epidemic that had not disappeared,” said K Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India.
“Victory was declared prematurely and that lavish mood was communicated across the country, especially by politicians who wanted to kick-start the economy and campaign again. And that gave the virus a chance to rise again. “
In West Bengal, where Modi’s government has refused to curtail the protracted state elections that his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hopes to win, Modi and his Home Secretary, Amit Shah, continue their public meetings and roadshows. continue in this week. rows of ambulances lined up outside hospitals across India. On Saturday, the same day as Modi’s meeting, the state registered 7,713 new cases – the highest number since the start of the pandemic. Three candidates who took part in the elections have died of the virus. Sunday, #ModiMadeDisaster started trending on Twitter.
Doctors on the front line broke down, speaking of the deluge of dying Covid patients they had been unable to treat due to a lack of beds and inadequate state and central government preparation.
Dr. Amit Thadhani, director of Mumbai’s Niramaya hospital, which only treats Covid patients, said he had issued warnings of a virulent second wave in February, but these had been ignored. He said his hospital was now “completely full and if a patient is discharged, the bed is filled within minutes.” Ten days ago, the hospital ran out of oxygen, but alternative supplies were found just in time.
“There are people queuing outside the hospital trying to get in and every day we get calls every 30 seconds from someone trying to find a bed,” said Thadhani. “Most of these calls are for patients who are seriously ill and need hospital care, but there is simply not enough capacity and so there is a lot of death. Everyone is stretched to the limit. “
Thadhani said that this time the virus was “much more aggressive and much more contagious” and now mainly affects young people. “Now it’s people in their twenties and thirties coming in with very severe symptoms and there is a lot of mortality among young people,” he said.
The terrifying sound of ambulance sirens kept echoing through the capital almost non-stop. Inside the Lok Nayak government hospital in Delhi, the largest Covid facility in the capital, overloaded facilities and a shortage of oxygen bottles meant that there were two in a bed, while outside patients on beds waited for air on stretchers and in ambulances as they sobbed relatives stood by their side. Some were left with oxygen bottles that they had bought for themselves out of desperation. Others died while waiting in the hospital parking lot.
In Mumbai, the first city to suffer from the second wave, Dr. Jalil Parkar of Lilavati Hospital said “the whole health care system has collapsed and doctors are exhausted.”
“There is a shortage of beds, a shortage of oxygen, a shortage of drugs, a shortage of vaccines, a shortage of tests,” said Parkar.
“Even though we opened a new wing for Covid, we still don’t have enough beds yet, so we had to place a number of patients in the corridors and turned the basement into a triage area for Covid patients. People in ambulances and wheelchairs are waiting outside the hospital and we sometimes have to give them oxygen outside. What else can we do? “
Even those in the higher echelons of power struggled to find beds for their loved ones. Vijay Singh Kumar, the national transport minister and a BJP MP in Uttar Pradesh state, turned to Twitter pleading, “Please help us, my brother needs a bed for corona treatment. Now, no beds are arranged in Ghaziabad. “
Announcing a six-day lockdown to prevent the complete collapse of the health care system, Delhi Prime Minister Arvind Kejriwal did not mince words. “Covid’s situation in Delhi is grim,” he said on Monday. More than 99% of the capital’s ICU beds were occupied that day, and by Tuesday several of Delhi’s top hospitals, all with hundreds of Covid patients, had declared an oxygen emergency, warning they were only on for a few hours. had stocks left.
States such as Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh are accused of obscuring the actual death toll from the coronavirus, with the number of bodies piling up in hospital morgues far exceeding the official death toll. One of the worst hit cities in Uttar Pradesh was Lucknow, where 22-year-old Deepti Mistri – a mother of someone who had no health problems – was one of the city’s dead after falling ill from Covid on April 14.
Her uncle Saroj Kumar Pandey, an ambulance driver who raised her from childhood, said he had desperately tried to find a hospital bed for her when, two days later, her oxygen level began to drop dangerously below 50% but she had nowhere to go. find room.
“I realized Deepti needed oxygen immediately, so I arranged a bottle for her myself,” he said. “I put her in the back of a relative’s car with the oxygen while I went to a dozen private and government hospitals to find a bed and a fan for her. But nowhere would she go. “
Finally, late at night on April 16, Pandey found a bed for her at a small private six-bed clinic in Lucknow. It was not a Covid hospital, but they agreed to take her for one night to give her oxygen while Pandey continued his search for a hospital bed. “We kept looking all night, but there was nowhere a bed or fan for her,” he said. In the morning, the clinic fired her at 5 a.m., so we had no choice but to take her home. Deepti died a few hours later from lack of oxygen and hospital care. She 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 experimentally used to treat Covid patients, which is still scarce in hospitals across the country .
The dead, meanwhile, continued to overburden crematoria and burial grounds in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Delhi faster than they could be burned, and families waited days to cremate their loved ones. On Sunday, Delhi’s largest cremation facility, Nigambodh Ghat, ran out of space, despite a doubling of the pyres to more than 60.
State governments in Delhi and Mumbai are in the process of rebuilding the temporary Covid facilities they had decommissioned months earlier, while the central government announced a strengthening of the vaccination program, which would mean that anyone over the age of 18 will be eligible from May 1 . a shortage of supplies remains a problem.
A government edict stated that all oxygen intended for industrial use would now be sent to hospitals to meet the unprecedented demand, and Indian Railways said they were all ready to operate special trains specifically designed to deliver liquid oxygen and to transport oxygen cylinders, called the ‘Oxygen Express’. Thousands of Covid beds have also been set up in train wagons.
Yet many fear that it is too little, too late. “The gravity of the situation should have been realized months ago, but instead the governments denied it and issued reports that the virus was no longer as dangerous,” said Thadhani. “I’m afraid we still haven’t seen the worst.”
Mohammad Sartaj Alam contributed to the reporting