Prayagraj, India
Bodies litter riverbanks: The bloated corpses of hundreds of Covid victims are washing up on the shores of India’s Ganges River. Hindus traditionally cremate their dead, but poor people who can’t afford that option have long placed their dead in shallow riverbank graves or floated the bodies in the river. Now, with so many people dying of Covid, the price of a cremation with burial rites has tripled to more than $200—causing more families to opt for river burials. While India has officially recorded some 275,000 Covid deaths, experts believe the real toll could be well over a million. In the city of Kanpur, for example, only 196 Covid deaths were recorded from April 16 to
May 5; the seven local crematoriums, however, said they had performed nearly 8,000 cremations in that time.