The stories are told on social media and in television
footage, showing desperate relatives pleading for oxygen outside hospitals or
weeping in the street for loved ones who died waiting for treatment.
One woman mourned the death of her younger brother, aged 50.
He was turned away by two hospitals and died waiting to be seen at a third,
gasping after his oxygen tank ran out and no replacements were to be had.
She blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government for the
crisis.
“He has lit funeral pyres in every house,” she cried in a
video shot by India’s weekly magazine The Caravan.
For the fourth straight day, India on Sunday set a global
daily record of new coronavirus infections, spurred by an insidious new variant
that emerged here. The surge has undermined the government’s premature claims
of victory over the pandemic.
The 349,691 confirmed infections over the past day brought
India’s total to more than 16.9 million cases, behind only the United States.
The Health Ministry reported another 2,767 deaths in the past 24 hours, pushing
India’s fatalities to 192,311.
Experts say this toll could be a huge undercount, as
suspected cases are not included, and many COVID-19 deaths are being attributed
to underlying conditions.
The unfolding crisis is most visceral in India’s overwhelmed
graveyards and crematoriums, and in heartbreaking images of gasping patients
dying on their way to hospitals due to lack of oxygen.
Burial grounds in the capital New Delhi are running out of
space. Bright, glowing funeral pyres light up the night sky in other badly hit
cities.
In the central city of Bhopal, some crematoriums have
increased their capacity from dozens of pyres to more than 50. Yet officials
say there are still hours-long waits.
At the city’s Bhadbhada Vishram Ghat crematorium, workers
said they cremated more than 110 people on Saturday, even as government figures
in the entire city of 1.8 million put the total number of virus deaths at just
10.
“The virus is swallowing our city’s people like a monster,”
said Mamtesh Sharma, an official at the site.
The unprecedented rush of bodies has forced the crematorium
to skip individual ceremonies and exhaustive rituals that Hindus believe
release the soul from the cycle of rebirth.
“We are just burning bodies as they arrive,” said Sharma.
“It is as if we are in the middle of a war.”
The head gravedigger at New Delhi’s largest Muslim cemetery,
where 1,000 people have been buried during the pandemic, said more bodies are
arriving now than last year. “I fear we will run out of space very soon,” said
Mohammad Shameem.
The situation is equally grim at unbearably full hospitals,
where desperate people are dying in line, sometimes on the roads outside,
waiting to see doctors.
Health officials are scrambling to expand critical care
units and stock up on dwindling supplies of oxygen. Hospitals and patients
alike are struggling to procure scarce medical equipment that’s being sold on
the black market at an exponential markup.
The drama is in direct contrast with government claims that
“nobody in the country was left without oxygen,” in a statement made Saturday
by India’s Solicitor General Tushar Mehta before Delhi High Court.
The breakdown is a stark failure for a country whose prime
minister only in January had declared victory over COVID-19, and which boasted
of being the “world’s pharmacy,” a global producer of vaccines and a model for
other developing nations.
Caught off-guard by the latest deadly spike, the federal
government has asked industrialists to increase the production of oxygen and
other life-saving drugs in short supply. But health experts say India had an
entire year to prepare for the inevitable — and it didn’t.
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, assistant professor of medicine in the
division of infectious diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina,
said the government should have used the last year, when the virus was more
under control, to stockpile medicines and develop systems to confront the
likelihood of a new surge.
“Most importantly, they should have looked at what was going
on in other parts of the world and understood that it was a matter of time
before they would be in a similar situation,” Kuppalli said.
Instead, the government’s premature declarations of victory
over the pandemic created a “false narrative,” which encouraged people to relax
health measures when they should have continued strict adherence to physical
distancing, wearing masks and avoiding large crowds.
Modi is facing mounting criticism for allowing Hindu
festivals and attending mammoth election rallies that experts suspect
accelerated the spread of infections. At one such rally on April 17, Modi
expressed his delight at the huge crowd, even as experts warned that a deadly
surge was inevitable with India already counting 250,000 new daily cases.
Now, with the death toll mounting, his Hindu nationalist
government is trying to quell critical voices.
On Saturday, Twitter complied with the government’s request
and prevented people in India from viewing more than 50 tweets that appeared to
criticize the administration’s handling of the pandemic. The targeted posts
include tweets from opposition ministers critical of Modi, journalists and
ordinary Indians.
A Twitter spokesperson said it had powers to “withhold
access to the content in India only” if the company determined the content to
be “illegal in a particular jurisdiction.” The company said it had responded to
an order by the government and notified people whose tweets were withheld.
India’s Information Technology Ministry did not respond to a
request for comment.
Even with the targeted blocks, horrific scenes of
overwhelmed hospitals and cremation grounds spread on Twitter and drew appeals
for help.
The U.S. is actively looking at ways to boost aid to India,
including sending oxygen supplies, virus tests, drug treatments and personal
protective equipment.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration’s top medical
adviser on the pandemic, told ABC’s “This Week” that the U.S. would review how
to increase India’s vaccine supply, such as by sending doses or helping India
“to essentially make vaccines themselves.”
The White House said national security adviser Jake Sullivan
spoke by phone Sunday with his Indian counterpart, Ajit Doval, and that the
U.S. is ’’working around the clock” to send supplies.
Help and support were also offered from archrival Pakistan,
with politicians, journalists and citizens in the neighboring country
expressing solidarity. Pakistan’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said it offered to
provide relief including ventilators, oxygen supply kits, digital X-ray
machines, PPE and related items.
“Humanitarian issues require responses beyond political
consideration,” Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said.
The Indian government did not immediately respond to
Qureshi’s statement.
-AP - Hussain reported from Srinagar, India.
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