MUMBAI — Santosh Pandey’s wife is the head of their village, population about 1,600, near the holy city of Varanasi in northern India. He sometimes answers her phone. So he’s up to date on what’s happening in town.
And what’s happening these days, he said, is horrific.
Fifty people from his village, Ashapur, and a neighboring one, Tilamapur, have died in the past two weeks. Most died at home, gasping for breath, with fevers. But only five or six of them were officially counted as COVID-19 deaths, Pandey said.
“There’s a shortage of coronavirus tests. Nobody’s getting tested! So the government’s numbers for our district are totally wrong,” he told NPR on a crackly phone line from his village. “If you’re able to get tested, results come after five days.”
By that time, some of them are already gone – cremated on the banks of the nearby Ganges River.
This village’s ordeal is not atypical. Across India, there are shortages of testing kits, hospital beds, medical oxygen and antiviral drugs as a severe second wave of the pandemic crushes the health infrastructure. The country has been breaking world records daily for new cases. On Friday, India’s Health Ministry confirmed 386,453 infections – more than any country on any day since the pandemic began.
Part of the reason for the huge numbers is India’s size: a population of nearly 1.4 billion. The rate of known coronavirus infections per capita is still less than the United States endured at its peak. In India, there have been nearly 19 million known infections since the start of the pandemic, or roughly 1.3% of the total population – compared with more than 32 million, or almost 10% of the U.S. population.
But survivors, funeral directors and scientists say the real numbers of infections and deaths in India may be many times more than the reported figures. The sheer number of patients has all but collapsed the health system in a country that invests less on public health — just above 1% of its gross domestic product — than most of its peers. (Brazil spends more than 9% of its GDP on health; in the U.S., the figure is nearly 18%.)
Across India, funeral pyres light up the night sky. Playgrounds and parking lots in the capital, New Delhi, have been converted into mass cremation grounds.
“The situation is very grim here. We are short of everything,” said Dr. Aniket Sirohi, a municipal health official in south Delhi. “I want to say to the world, ‘Help us, in any way you can.’ “
Sirohi is supposed to be working on malaria prevention. But since the pandemic began, he’s had the unenviable job of counting bodies. Each day, he goes to every crematorium and burial ground in his district of the capital, tallying deaths from COVID-19. Of his 11 staff members, five currently have COVID-19, he said.
“We are just doing the best we can. The morale is pretty shaken up,” he said. “I have not taken a single day off.”
Last year, at the height of the pandemic’s first wave in India, Sirohi said he was counting about 220 COVID-19 deaths a day. When NPR spoke to him Wednesday, he counted 702 for that day. He passes those numbers up the chain of command. But the death figures the government ultimately publishes for his region have been at least 20% lower than what he’s seeing on the ground, he said.
IHe attributed this disparity to administrative chaos. People from neighboring states flock to Delhi for medical treatment. Some die in Delhi and are cremated there but remain registered as residents somewhere else. They don’t get counted anywhere, he said.
