With vital oxygen deficient, family members in India travel from hospital to hospital in search of treatment as the country is gripped by a new devastating wave of infections. Too often, their efforts end in mourning.
Stories are told on social media and on television footage of desperate relatives begging for oxygen outside hospitals or crying on the street over loved ones who died while awaiting treatment.
One woman mourned the death of her 50-year-old younger brother. He was denied access to two hospitals and died while waiting to be examined in a third, gasping for breath after he ran out of oxygen and had no replacement.
She blamed the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the crisis.
“He lit funeral pyres in every home,” she exclaimed in a video filmed by the Indian weekly The Caravan.
For the fourth day in a row, India set a global daily record for new coronavirus infections on Sunday, aided by an insidious new variant that has emerged here. The surge has undermined the government’s premature announcements of defeating the pandemic.
As a result of 349,691 confirmed infections in the last day, the total number of cases in India exceeded 16.9 million, second only to the United States. The Ministry of Health has reported an additional 2,767 deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll in India to 192,311.
Experts say these losses could be grossly underestimated as the estimated cases are not included and many deaths from COVID-19 are linked to underlying medical conditions.
The evolving crisis is most evident in overcrowded cemeteries and crematoria in India, as well as in the heartbreaking images of suffocating patients dying on their way to hospitals due to lack of oxygen.
There is not enough space in crematoria in the capital New Delhi. Bright, glowing funeral pyres illuminate the night sky in other heavily-affected cities.
In the central city of Bhopal, the capacity of some crematoria has increased from dozens of cremations to more than 50 per day and huge queues line up.
At the city’s Bhadbhada Vishram Ghat crematorium, workers said they cremated more than 110 people on Saturday, although government figures for the entire city of 1.8 million put the total number of deaths from the virus at just 10.
“The virus is devouring the inhabitants of our city like a monster,” said Mamtesh Sharma, a spokesman for the crematorium.
The unprecedented influx of bodies forced the crematorium to skip individual ceremonies and exhaustive rituals that, according to Hindus, free the soul from the cycle of rebirth.
“We just burn the bodies when they arrive,” Sharma said. “It’s as if we’re in the midst of a war.”
