Rural India overwhelmed by Covid-19
● Surge in infections exposes inadequate health facilities in countryside
Weakened by fever and gasping for breath, 47-year-old Vinod Kumar died in an ambulance more than 60km from his home in India’s eastern Bihar state, far from the big cities at the centre of the nation’s devastating Covid-19 crisis.
His death last week followed a frantic journey and dozens of phone calls by desperate relatives in search of a hospital bed and oxygen supplies, as a nationwide surge in coronavirus cases exposed the limitations of health facilities in the countryside.
“We admitted him wherever we found a bed.
“It was a nursing home but wasn’t functioning like one.
“Patients were getting their own oxygen,” Vinod’s brother, Kameshwar Kumar, said.
“The hospital was rationing its oxygen supply to patients and my brother was sinking so we were forced to rush him to another hospital but he didn’t make it,” Kumar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
India’s Covid-19 crisis has been most acute in the capital, New Delhi, among other cities, but in rural areas — home to nearly 70% of the country’s 1.3billion people — limited public health care is posing particular challenges.
Ill-equipped hospitals, staff shortages and long journeys to dedicated Covid-19 wards are making it harder for village patients to access treatment as a second wave pushes India’s total coronavirus cases to more than 20-million this week.
Less extensive testing and public awareness about the disease’s symptoms — especially in the countryside — mean the actual number of infections could be five to 10 times higher than reported, medical experts say.
“The situation has become dangerous in villages,” human rights charity Manav Sansadhan Evam Mahila Vikas Sansthan’s field co-ordinator, Suresh Kumar, said.
In some villages where the charity works in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh — home to about 200-million people — there were deaths in almost every second house, he said.
“People are scared and huddled in their homes with fever and cough.
“The symptoms are all of Covid-19, but with no information available many think it is seasonal flu.”
India’s health ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
In the village of Kodai, which lies in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Varanasi constituency, emergency facilities set up during last year’s first wave of coronavirus infections were dismantled earlier this year when cases dropped.
“The quarantine centres set up for returning migrant workers were closed and so are the fever camps,” village resident Vijay Kumar said by phone.
“Returning migrant workers are going home, falling sick and there is no-one keeping track.
“People are drinking home concoctions and depending on quacks for treatment.
“Most of them are dying in the process.”
Elsewhere, activists warn that pre-monsoon agriculture activities mean more farm workers are on the move — increasing the risk of contagion in rural districts.
In Bihar’s Bikram district, about 200,000 residents of 15 villages have one primary healthcare centre equipped for Covid care, with a stock of 12 oxygen cylinders and one ambulance.
As cases multiply, such stocks are woefully inadequate.
“We have asked for 30 more oxygen cylinders as our stock may fall short,” the monitoring and evaluation officer for Bikram, Om Prakash Kumar, said.
About 150 coronavirus cases have been registered in the district over the past 15 days.
In Patna, Bihar’s capital, nearly 40 of 100 test samples are positive and hospitals are overrun.
“I get calls for beds every day.
“But where are the beds? “Our in-charge of a primary healthcare centre died last night in a private nursing home as we couldn’t find him a bed in a proper hospital,” Krishnakant Singh, who oversees two primary healthcare centres in Patna district, said.
“Just oxygen won’t help, we need intensive care units and ventilators.
“Just breathing has become difficult here,” he said. —