Dozens of bodies of people presumed dead from Covid-19 have washed up on the banks of the Ganges in northern India, authorities said on Monday.
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The pandemic is spreading at full speed across India's vast rural hinterland, overwhelming health facilities, crematoriums and cemeteries. A local official, Ashok Kumar, said around 40 bodies had washed up in Buxar district, near the border between Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, two of India's poorest states. "
We ordered the officials concerned to deal with the bodies, and either bury them or burn them,
" Kumar told AFP. Some media have claimed that the number of corpses could reach a hundred.
The same sources quote other officials specifying that some bodies are blistered and partially burned and may have spent several days in the river. Residents told AFP they believed the corpses were thrown into the water because the crematoriums were overwhelmed or because relatives of the victims could not pay for the wood needed for the funeral pyres. “
It's really shocking for us,
” said one resident, Kameshwar Pandey.
According to official statistics, some 4,000 people currently die each day from Covid-19 in India, where the total toll of the epidemic is close to 250,000 deaths. Many experts consider these figures lower than reality, citing in particular data from crematoriums. The unaccounted for victims are particularly numerous now that the current epidemic outbreak has spread outside the big cities, into rural areas where hospitals are scarce and keep their registers little up to date.