No beds, packed morgues: Mumbai hospitals near collapse

MUMBAI: Packed morgues, bodies in wards, patients forced to share beds and medical workers run ragged: Mumbai’s war against coronavirus has pushed the Indian city’s hospitals to breaking point. Ravi, 26, had to change his mother’s diapers himself as she lay dying from the disease in the huge Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital, better known as Sion.

“They would just give us medicines and leave,” Ravi (not his real name) told AFP. Staff in the 1,300bed facility were “overworked and tired”, he said, with sometimes three patients per bed.

Now he too has contracted the virus and is in another hospital—but only after four facilities refused to admit him. “We don’t have the infrastructure for this disease,” he said. The state-run Sion hospital has become a byword for the stunning failure of Mumbai—home to billionaires, Bollywood and slums—to cope with the pandemic. A video widely shared on social media and shown on Indian TV showed corpses wrapped in black plastic left on beds in a ward where patients are being treated. Authorities said they were investigating the footage.

With space at a premium, and relatives too afraid or unable to claim their dead because they are themselves in quarantine, disposal of coronavirus corpses is not easy, doctors say. But dealing with the sick is much harder. “We don’t have enough beds to manage so many cases. The emergency area gets full in a matter of hours,” Aditya Burje, a junior doctor working night shifts at Sion hospital, told AFP. The hospital’s proximity to India’s biggest slum Dharavi makes it a key battleground in the fight against the pandemic. “In March there were just one or two suspected cases a day. It all seemed to be under control.