The health catastrophe in the country reaches unimaginable proportions • More than 2,000 patients die every day, and in the streets - queues of hours for cremation • Special report
Cremation site in the city of Kanpur // Photo: Navneet Jayaswal
These scary spectacles are seen everywhere now in India: long lines of corpses from the corona awaiting cremation.
In urban areas such as Delhi, Hopal and Mumbai, people are forced to wait three or four hours so that they can perform the religious farewell ceremonies from their dead loved ones.
To expedite the processes, makeshift incinerators were created in the areas next to the crematorium complexes.
"The fire from the fire surfaces on the banks of the Hindun River in the city of Ghaziabad (about 50 km from Delhi) does not stop for a moment," wrote journalist Riaz Hashemi.
"People bring corpses from Delhi and places here, so funeral rites here are growing," said Paramud Kumar Sharma of Gaziabad, who lost a family member to the epidemic. from them".
The statistics in India are inconceivable: more than 300,000 new cases are discovered every day - 40 percent of the total daily diagnoses in the world, and in total more than 16.6 million Indians have been infected with the virus since the epidemic began.
Last week, the country broke the world record for the number of daily cases.
More than 2,000 people die here every day, and that is only if you count the cases listed as being caused by the corona.
Due to lack of time, some deaths are not investigated.
Within 15 days, the daily number of patients jumped from 100,000 to 300,000. Now the virus has also begun to spread to rural areas, which until now have not been affected by corona. For example, if until two weeks ago about 48 percent of cases of the virus came from the state of Maharashtra, now only 20 percent of cases originate from it. In fact, it can now be said that half of the cases of infection in India are from five administrative territories: Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and the territory of Delhi, where the capital is also located. One in three tests in the capital area turns out positive. Most of the countries in India are moving towards a closure, and in some of them total closures have been imposed that will last till the end of the month. In some countries a partial closure has been imposed in some areas. But Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked the states to use the closure only as a last resort.
One of the major problems now is the lack of proper beds and facilities in hospitals. "I lost more than 12 friends in one week," said Dash Deepak Singh, a lawyer from Uttar Pradesh. "Many of the people died not from Corona, but from the chaos of the administration. They are already suffering from irreversible damage. " A local public health expert says the omission would not have occurred if the authorities had taken advantage of the relative calm period at the start of the epidemic to prepare properly.