India’s deepening Covid crisis is “absolutely heart breaking,” Al Jazeera correspondent Elizabeth Puranam says.
India reported 379,257 new infections yesterday, the world's highest single-day total. The official death toll has surpassed 200,000 but experts believe it is significantly higher.
Photo: AFP
New Delhi-based Puranam says the city’s healthcare system is at breaking point.
“It’s really difficult to describe the scale of the misery in Delhi and beyond right now, it is really difficult to even fathom it it is absolutely heart breaking.”
In India’s capital, she says, you see desperate family members begging hospital staff to admit their sick loved ones but being turned away.
“We have really ill people collapsing outside hospitals. Frail elderly people sitting outside hospitals hooked up to oxygen cylinders,” Puranam says.
Although the city is in lockdown the streets are busy, she says.
“What you are seeing all the time are ambulances, sometimes you see ambulances carrying dead bodies, you see people everywhere both in their cars or on scooters carrying oxygen cylinders.”
There are also long lines queuing at testing centres because labs are so overwhelmed, she says.
“You are surrounded by people who have the virus, so many of my neighbours, so many of my friends, so it is a really incredibly worrying situation here.”
Aid is starting to arrive from overseas and the Indian government has “woken up” to the situation.
“It is boosting critical care facilities now, having a lot of oxygen generation plants setting them up, using the Indian air force, using Indian railways to transport oxygen around the country
“It is using stadiums, banquet halls and wedding halls to create more beds.”
The situation will get worse before it improves, she says, and the recorded daily cases are likely many times higher.
“Health experts are saying we are still at the beginning of the second wave and the peak of the second wave isn’t going to be for another four weeks.
“While what we are living through right now feels like a nightmare, we have to keep in mind that the cases are only going to go up.”
India's domestic vaccination programme is not going well, despite it being the world’s biggest vaccine maker, Puranam says.
“It has shipped more than 60 million vaccines and then realised that it had a shortage at home.”
Vaccination centres throughout the country of 1.3 billion are putting up signs saying they have run out of doses and are turning people away, she says.
There is mounting anger with Government’s earlier complacency, she says.
“Health experts were saying as early as October that India is going to go through a massive second wave.
“When cases came down to very low numbers 10,000 to 11,000 on average earlier this year the Government declared that India had defeated Covid-19, they opened up the economy, they allowed large, large gathering to go ahead involving millions of people.”
The government bought into the idea of “Indian exceptionalism”, she says.
And amidst this mounting crisis there has been a lack of official information.
“Prime minister Narendra Modi, not once in his seven years of power has held a press conference and taken questions from journalists.”
Meanwhile migrant workers made jobless in the cities are returning home to rural areas further spreading the virus and putting additional strain on rural health services.
“India’s health system is underfunded it spends less than 1 percent of its GDP on health,” Puranam says.
