“We are working 24 hours a day with a 100% capacity to incinerate bodies on time,” Kamlesh Sailor, the president of the trust that runs the Gujarat crematorium in the city of Surat, said in Reuters. the diamonds.
With hospitals full and oxygen and medicines scarce in an already crunchy health system, several major cities report a much larger number of cremations and burials according to coronavirus protocols than official Covid-19 death tolls. , according to cremation and cemetery workers, media and a review of government data.
India on Monday recorded a record 273,810 new daily infections and 1,619 deaths. Its total number of cases now stands at more than 15 million, second only to the United States.
Reliable data is at the heart of any government response to the pandemic, without which hospital planning, oxygen and medicine vacancies become difficult, according to experts.
Government officials say the discrepancy in death levels can be caused by several factors, including excessive caution.
A senior state health official said the increase in the number of cremations had been due to the bodies being incinerated using Covid protocols “even if there is a 0.1% chance the person is positive.”
“In many cases, patients arrive at the hospital in an extremely critical condition and die before the test, and there are cases where patients are taken to the hospital and we don’t know if they are positive or not,” he said. say the official.
“Data Denial”
But Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan, said many parts of India were in “data denial.”
“Everything is so muddy,” he said. “No one seems to understand the situation very clearly, and that’s very annoying.”
In Surat, the second largest city in Gujarat, the Sailor Kurukshetra crematorium and a second crematorium known as Umra have cremated more than 100 bodies a day under the Covid protocols over the past week, far exceeding the official death toll of the city around 25, according to interviews with workers.
Prashant Kabrawala, administrator of Narayan Trust, which runs a third city crematorium called Ashwinikumar, refused to provide the number of bodies received under Covid protocols, but said cremations there had tripled in recent weeks.
“I’ve been going to the crematorium regularly since 1987 and I’ve been involved in its day-to-day running since 2005, but I haven’t seen so many dead bodies coming to burn in all these years,” even during an outbreak of bubonic plague on 1994 and floods in 2006, Kabrawala said.
Government spokesmen in Gujarat did not respond to requests for comment.
Mukherjee’s research on India’s first wave concludes that there were 11 times more infections than reported, in line with estimates from studies conducted in other countries. There were also two to five times more deaths than reported, well above world averages.
Working day and night
In Lucknow, the capital of the populous northern state of Uttar Pradesh, data from Covid’s largest crematorium, Baikunthdham, show twice the number of bodies arriving on six different days in April than government data on deaths by covides of the whole city.
The figures do not take into account a second Covid crematorium in the city, nor the burials in the Muslim community that makes up a quarter of the city’s population.
The head of the Azad crematorium, which has only one name, said the number of cremations under Covid protocols has multiplied by five in recent weeks.
“We’re working day and night,” he said. “Incinerators work full time, but many people still have to wait with their bodies for the last rites.”
A Uttar Pradesh government spokesman did not respond to any requests for comment.
Elsewhere, local newspaper India Today reported two crematoria in Bhopal, the capital of the central state of Madhya Pradesh; 187 bodies were cremated following Covid protocols in four days this month, while the official death toll at Covid was five.
Last week, Sandesh, a Gujarati newspaper, counted 63 bodies leaving a single Covid hospital to bury it in the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad, on a day when government data showed 20 deaths from coronavirus .
The medical journal Lancet noted last year that four states in India, which accounted for 65% of Covid fatalities, each recorded 100% of their coronavirus deaths.
But less than a quarter of deaths in India are medically certified, mostly in rural areas, meaning the true coveted mortality rate in many of India’s other 24 states may never be known.
“Most deaths are not recorded, so it is impossible to make a validation calculation,” Mukherjee said.