The COVID-19 crisis in India is a ‘nightmare’
Gravediggers get no rest, funeral pyres burn constantly
MUMBAI, India — The bodies have burned for so long at crematoriums in the western state of Gujarat that furnaces have started to melt.
Firewood for funeral pyres is rationed and sparse, leaving the dead half-cremated on the banks of the Ganges. Gravediggers in the capital New Delhi are in such high demand that families are hiring them to excavate plots while stricken loved ones are still alive.
All across India, a trail of death and misery is devastating a country whose leaders boasted of defeating the coronavirus just a few months ago. An explosion of new cases fueled by the so-called double-mutant variant of the coronavirus first discovered in India is now pushing the nation’s overburdened health care system toward collapse.
About 350,000 new infections are being reported each day, a record for any country since the virus first emerged from China more than a year ago, killing in excess of 3.1 million people worldwide.
Oxygen is in short supply and dying patients take their breaths in hallways, waiting rooms and outside the gates of Indian hospitals too overwhelmed to accept new patients. It is like this every day; eerie marches of the sick and dying, crowding alleys and wider streets, as if ghosts from a centuries-old plague.
Many Indians are logging on to Twitter for the first time, pleading for help in finding oxygen tanks, which now sell on the black market for double to triple a worker’s monthly salary. Exhausted nurses complain of urinary tract infections because they can’t take bathroom breaks during shifts that never seem to end.
“Everyone just feels helpless,” said Chaithra Kodmad, 28, an emergency room doctor at a private hospital in Bengaluru, which has run out of beds in its intensive care unit. “This virus is everywhere. It’s entered peoples’ homes. It doesn’t care what age you are, what caste you belong to. It doesn’t matter.”
Kodmad, like many other health care workers in India, said vaccinated colleagues are still being infected by the doublemutant variant, which earned its name from a pair of mutations derived from a highly infectious variant prevalent in California and another thought to be resistant to vaccines that was first found in South Africa.
Experts are trying to pinpoint what impact variants have had in the outbreak. The World Health Organization said this week that the variant from India, officially known as B1617, has been detected in at least 17 countries, including the U.S.
But it is striking here with swift cruelty. The outbreak has already disrupted India’s pledge to provide millions of doses of the vaccine to developing countries. India — home to the Serum Institute, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer and maker of the AstraZeneca shot — has stopped exports to address domestic shortages.
The crisis, which is exposing the divide between rich and poor nations, threatens to prolong the global pandemic just as such Western countries as the U.S. have stepped up vaccines and loosened COVID-19 restrictions.
India also thought it was turning the corner at the start of the year after undergoing a painful lockdown that was politically unpopular and left millions of mostly migrant workers jobless. Then, an uptick in cases spiraled and India became a cautionary tale.