Horror, heartache on India’s frontline
STEPHANIE Raison had made it through 100 days of India’s first lockdown when the Modi Government eased its COVID-19 restrictions and she was allowed to return to the streets of her adopted home of New Delhi.
But the Adelaide-born UNICEF communications team leader immediately found herself in a new, unexpected health crisis.
The 39-year-old laughs as she recounts that first day of freedom, when she was bitten by a stray dog in the street.
“Luckily, the office helped me get to the clinic. I had my rabies shot … then it was back into quarantine for another two weeks,” she says.
Still, Ms Raison knows how lucky she is, watching in despair as friends, their families and work colleagues stare down the grim reality of India in the grips of its lethal second wave and the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The latest health figures are shocking, with infections in India hitting a record daily high of 412,262 cases for a staggering total of 2.1 million.
More than 3980 deaths were recorded in those 24 hours.
But authorities are sure the country’s 230,168 body count is being under-reported.
For her part, Ms Raison and her media team are working around the clock to produce critical health messaging, urging locals to wear masks and
maintain COVID protocols in a country where 1.5m social distancing is impossible in the poorest slums and cramped family homes.
“Here, when you talk about a family living together, you’re talking about an extended family. So the grandparents, a couple of brothers and their partners or their wives and the children … everybody is close
together,” Ms Raison explained. “Physical distance is very difficult.”
During the first lockdown, Ms Raison worked with local filmmakers and even schoolchildren to tell their stories to the world and plead for help and critical services.
It’s the children she fears for the most, as death becomes their new normal.
“The thing to remember is that children in India have been out of school, in many cases, for more than a year now and many of them do not have access to online education,” she says.
While a shortage of oxygen supplies appears to have been addressed by international donations, Ms Raison says hospital and health support staff
remain at breaking point.
The doctor wife of a UNICEF health colleague was vaccinating 150 people a day and receiving thousands of phone calls from locals desperate to be inoculated.
“I really worry about the healthcare workers because they’re the ones on the front line,” she says.
The scale of devastation makes it impossible not to be touched by the tragedy, which aid workers fear is worse than the 2004 tsunami.
“Every message that you receive, all the phone calls, there’s not one person that I know in India who isn’t affected,” Ms Raison says.
“Either they’ve had COVID-19 or their family member has had it or they’re caring for somebody who has COVID-19.
“We’re living in this constant state of edginess, of dismay and despair.”
Believing she had COVID herself in the early days of the pandemic, Ms Raison was forcing herself to take time each day for fresh air and exercise to build her strength.
But with funeral pyres raging across the city to dispose of thousands of COVID casualties, it’s the acrid smoke of bodies being burned that she found herself inhaling.
Ms Raison, a Flinders University graduate who began volunteering for UNICEF in Kenya a decade ago, said the pandemic had made her feel homesick for “the first time”.
“I just want 24 hours to walk on the beach without a mask on and not to have this feeling of anxiousness or that feeling you need to just keep going and keep responding,” she says.
But there is also the reward of playing her part in the humanitarian crisis. “It’s good to know it makes a little difference in people’s lives.”