As the dead pile up in Gujarat, the state’s media is on a warpath with the government over Covid-19 // Soutik Biswas: How India failed to prevent a deadly second wave
On Tuesday, as the second wave of Covid-19 continued surging across India, Gujarat reported 6,690 new cases and 67 deaths across the state – the highest single-day tallies since the start of the pandemic last year. These official figures are grim in themselves, but the reality on the ground is much, much worse, video footage, news reports and interviews with those running crematoriums and burial grounds suggest.
In the past three days, almost every news outlet in Gujarat – be it print, television, English-language or Gujarati – has put the spotlight on the staggering mismatch between the government’s official Covid-19 death count and the number of dead being cremated or buried in cities. In Ahmedabad, for instance, the state government had officially declared just 20 Covid-19 deaths on April 12. But Sandesh, a leading Gujarati newspaper, claimed that at least 63 people had died in just one government-run Covid-19 hospital in the city on the same day.
In a report published in Sandesh on Tuesday, the paper claimed that its journalists had arrived at the figure by camping outside Ahmedabad Civil Hospital’s 1,200-bed dedicated Covid-19 wing for 17 hours, counting every dead body being brought out of the morgue from midnight to 5 pm on April 12. The headline in Sandesh's Tuesday edition reads, "In just 17 hours, 63 dead bodies reached crematoriums from Civil Hospital". The report also contained a list of the license plate numbers of the morgue vans that left the hospital's Covid-19 wing on Monday.
Last week, Chief Minister Vijay Rupani denied the state government
was hiding the true Covid-19 death counts. He claimed Gujarat follows
guidelines by the Indian Council of Medical Research that require Covid-19 to
be listed as the cause of the death only when it is the primary cause. In case
of patients with co-morbidities, if doctors determine that Covid-19 was the
secondary cause of death, it is not attributed to the virus….
How India failed to prevent a deadly second wave
In early March, India's health minister Harsh Vardhan declared the country was "in the endgame" of the Covid-19 pandemic. Mr Vardhan also lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership as an "example to the world in international co-operation". From January onwards, India had begun shipping doses to foreign countries as part of its much-vaunted "vaccine diplomacy".
Mr Vardhan's unbridled optimism was based on a sharp drop in reported infections. Since a peak of more than 93,000 cases per day on average in mid-September, infections had steadily declined. By mid-February, India was counting an average of 11,000 cases a day. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from the disease had slid to below 100.
The euphoria at beating the virus had been building since late last year. Politicians, policy makers and parts of the media believed that India was truly out of the woods. In December, central bank officials announced that India was "bending the Covid infection curve". There was evidence, they said, in poetic terms, that the economy was "breaking out amidst winter's lengthening shadows towards a place in sunlight". Mr Modi was called a "vaccine guru"….
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