When the second Covid wave gripped India sometimes in March and new cases started spiraling like poppies from the seedlings of a deadly new variant, the country’s numerous crematorium and graveyards still provided time and space to graciously perform the last rites of Covid-19 victims-and mourn in silence.
But the virus has turned deadlier by the day, and India’s death rate has more than doubled during the last one month alone. The final resting places of the dead are now a scene of heart-rending chaos, where pyres burn round-the-clock and tears never stop flowing.
The way the death count in India has soared is alarming, to say the least. A month ago, on April 10 to be precise, India recorded 838 deaths as against 1,52,565 new cases for a fatality rate of 0.55 per cent. One month down the line on May 10, India recorded 3,29,491 cases and 3,847 deaths in a single day for a fatality rate of 1.17 per cent.
The death count clearly more than doubled in just one month.
But that may be an understatement going by the tale of horror emerging from all over the country with dead bodies piling up on pavements and being washed up on the banks of Ganga in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and crematorium putting up “houseful boards”, and experts talking about ten-time more fatalities than the official count.
The rise in India’s death rate has not followed a uniform pattern State-wise. For example, while Kerala has a very low fatality rate despite high number of infections, others such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Delhi and Karnataka have far greater death count per thousand infections.
India’s death count is now higher than the USA (which once recorded a fatality rate of close to 4-5 per cent), and Spain, Germany, and the UK.
France at this time around leads the globe in terms of fatality rate. The country on Monday recorded 292 deaths against the single-day infection count of 3,292, which translated into a fatality rate of more than 8 per cent.
France is followed by Turkey, Brazil and Italy even as a host of other nations have sub 1 per cent fatality rate.
One of the main reasons for India’s growing fatality count is its collapsing health infrastructure in the face of the rising number of cases.
Oxygen shortage, unavailability of ventilators, and vanishing life-saving drugs, have combined to create a dreadful scenario where more patients are dying due to reasons other than Corona infections.
Reports are pouring in from all over the country showing a gross mismatch between the bodies arriving at crematorium and the numbers of dead in official ledgers. There have been numerous TV and print media reports of fatality undercounting from West Bengal, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Odisha, Kerala, Karnataka, Bihar, Haryana, and Chhattisgarh.
Noted US-based health experts Dr Ashish Jha has already pointed out that at least 25,000 Indians are dying every day of Covid. If the official figure were to catch that reality, India would be bruising shoulders with some of the worst impacted nations in the world in terms of Covid-19 fatality.