For about 3 weeks since India recorded its highest daily Coronavirus deaths – 4,529 deaths on May 18 – the country has been on its way to recovery. At least that was the perception based on official data. Yesterday (May 9), the data showed it recorded only 2,177 deaths, a spectacular achievement compared to last month when crematoriums were overwhelmed.

 

Today (May 10), however, the country’s daily death toll in the previous 24 hours suddenly shot to 6,148 – the highest record in the world. The previous world record was 5,527 deaths in the United States on Feb 12. Apparently, the latest fatalities spiked after Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, revised its total Covid-19 related death toll on Wednesday.

 

The Bihar health department hiked its death toll by 3,951 on Wednesday due to uncounted Covid-related deaths. It claimed the revision of the data was due to the infection in private hospitals and clinics until June 7 which were not accounted for. The latest figures effectively pushed Bihar’s reported total Covid deaths to 9,429 (from 5,424), including about 1,500 in the first wave.

The Bihar state department was forced to set up two health committees to audit the Covid-19 death toll after facing criticism over reports of discrepancy between government and municipal corporations’ data. After allegations that the local government was hiding the scale of infections and deaths, Bihar’s high court in Patna has demanded an audit of the figures.

 

However, this could be just the tip of the iceberg. Similar accusations have been levelled at other state governments in the country after a recent Coronavirus surge saw crematoriums overwhelmed and hundreds of bodies dumped in rivers. Suspicions were raised based on the fact that death rates in countries like Brazil and the U.S. are several times higher than in India.

 

Even during normal times, recordkeeping has been poor in the country. This has led experts to believe that India’s Covid death toll is several times higher than the official number, which currently stands at 360,078. It means the actual deaths could easily breach a million, making India the champion for the wrong reason. Currently, the U.S. topped the chart with 613,506 deaths while Brazil at second spot (479,791 deaths).

If India’s Covid total cases, which now stands at 29.2 million, have been under-reported too due to cover-up or other reasons, it will also catapult the country to the top of the chart as the U.S. is not far ahead with 34.2 million cases. With 17.1 million cases, Brazil has the third-highest tally of Covid-19 infections in the world, behind the U.S. and India.

 

Even though India’s daily infections have plunged to below 100,000 for the third consecutive day, India is still fighting a devastating second wave of the outbreak that started in February and accelerated in April and early May. As a result, the country’s healthcare infrastructure was overwhelmed so much so Indian hospitals struggled with shortages of beds, oxygen and medication.

 

The collapse of healthcare infrastructure saw people die in parking lots outside hospitals and in their homes, leading to unrecorded deaths from Covid. To make matters worse, two-thirds of Indians live in rural areas where test facilities and hospitals are rare commodities. This leads to the belief that both Coronavirus infections and deaths have been significantly undercounted across the nation.

Even in the country’s capital of Delhi, which has better health infrastructure than most parts of the country, hospitals were struggling for medical oxygen as the commodity was reduced to a few hours. As desperate people queued up outside oxygen refilling centres, hospitals struggled to accommodate breathless patients as young as 22. They have resorted to social media to beg for oxygen cylinders.

 

Besides lack of oxygen support, ambulance, ICU beds and ventilators, grieving families were being asked to wait because crematoriums ran out of space. With desperate people already dying, sometimes on the roads outside, while waiting to see doctors, crematoriums were forced to skip ceremonies and rituals. Dead bodies are burned as they arrive.

 

Some crematoriums ran out of wood and asked people to bring it themselves. As some crematoriums were working around the clock at 100% capacity, gas and firewood furnaces have been running so long without a break that metal parts have begun to melt. In the southern state of Karnataka, the government was forced to permit families to cremate or bury their dead loved ones in their own farms, lands or backyards.

As crematoriums struggled to handle the wave of deaths over the past two months, many families placed bodies in the holy Ganges River or buried them in shallow graves on its sandbanks. These people would most likely not have been included in the Covid death toll. While under-reporting is a widespread problem, they are not necessarily deliberate.

 

The New York Times estimated Coronavirus death toll in India to be between 600,000 and 1.6 million. Of course, Modi administration has rubbished those figures as exaggerated. However, the main opposition Congress party said that other states must follow Bihar’s example and conduct a review of deaths over the past two months, without which it proves the government has been hiding Covid deaths.

 

To add salt to injury, the vaccination program, which started slow, has hit an obstacle. The rollout, which began in January, faced problems, including a vaccine shortage. Only 3.3% of India’s 1.4 billion populations so far have received full doses of the vaccines. The government estimates that more than 2 billion doses of vaccine could be available only by December.

 

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June 10th, 2021 by financetwitter

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