NASHVILLE, TN– India is staggering from COVID-19. Officials say 2,000 people are dying every day. Funeral pyres are burning bodies around the clock and the actual daily death toll could be as high as 10,000. New cases are averaging 400,000 per day.
Adar Poonawalla, chief of the world’s largest vaccine maker, the Serum Institute of India, now travels with armed guards. He had promised to supply the world’s poorest nations with COVID vaccines. But the company suffered production problems, raised its prices, and just recently lowered them again. The Indian government ordered Poonawalla to turn over all his vaccines to them.
India is the world’s largest democracy with an estimated 1.4 billion people. Half are under the age of 28. Only 2% of India population has been vaccinated. And there aren’t nearly enough doses to go around.
Nobody knows exactly why, but India largely escaped the worst of the first wave of COVID-19 last year. India’s early good luck and noblesse oblige towards less fortunate nations is over, replaced by an unexpected and devastating surge of the disease. Overnight, India has turned into a beggar nation.
President Biden sent a hundred-million-dollar aid package to India. It included antiviral drugs like remdesivir, test kits, PPEs, oxygen, parts and supplies needed to make vaccines.
US military airplanes delivered a load last Thursday along with a strike team to help set up temporary hospitals. Biden promised to send 10 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Biden is facing pressure to send 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that the U.S will probably not need.
“We want to keep the pressure on the Biden administration to acknowledge that this is a humanitarian crisis. Until the world moves past COVID no individual country can move past COVID. So we are essentially saying ‘thanks for what you did but we need to do more’,” said Senator Mark Warner (D-VA). He and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) wrote a joint letter to the White House last week.
International health groups argue that the U.S. commitment is not nearly large enough. “Sixty million doses — that’s showing up to a four-alarm fire with an eyedropper full of water,” said Asia Russell, the executive director of Health GAP, a global AIDS treatment advocacy organization. India’s 1.4 billion people need 100 times more vaccines than Biden promised to send.
Last week three frontline Indian doctors briefed ethnic media reporters from the U.S. They talked about the first wave of COVID-19 in India last year and compared it to the latest outbreak that can only be described as devastating.
During the first wave in March 2020, much of the world, including India, was in lockdown. In May 2020, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ended a national two-month lockdown and opened up the economy. People went back to work. Weddings and large public religious festivals resumed. The virus started infecting more and more people.
“So everybody started opening up to such an extent that we as citizens of India became very complacent about social distancing and the wearing of masks,” said Dr. Jalil Parkar. He is a lung disease specialist at Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai.
Parkar said that things were still under control by late Fall 2020. But the second wave was already on its way and few people anticipated the havoc it would bring.
“What happened was that the health workers, the police personnel, the fire brigades, the doctors, the resident doctors, the nurses, the nursing attendants, technicians, they all got tired and fatigued. And the worst part was most of them started getting infected with COVID-19,” he said.
The coronavirus ravaged the country in just a few weeks. “The second wave was worse than a tsunami. It was like a nuclear bomb or carpet bombing,” Parkar said.
In India’s major cities, the middle class in their apartments and slum-dwellers alike, all started catching the disease. Amid rising panic, antiviral medicines suddenly became scarce and fraudsters started selling fake remdesivir in glass vials to people desperate to help their loved ones.
“What does a physician do, what does a nurse do if a patient comes to a hospital and there is no oxygen? What are we supposed to do?”
Thousands of very sick people desperately sought help from doctors who were facing a medical crisis of unprecedented proportions. To make matters worse, the new wave arrived right in the middle of state election campaigns.
In West Bengal and its capital, Kolkata (Calcutta), Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and the Trinamool Congress party held huge political rallies. They were super spreader events.
“Studies have shown that around March 1, 2021 the rates of infection were the same but by April 15, it was double in the states that were going into elections,” said journalist Sandip Roy.
On April 5, 2021 as hospitals filled up with COVID-19 patients, Modi ordered a second national lockdown. It came one week after elections began in West Bengal, lasting a month.
Modi was widely criticized for caring more about politics than public health and his Janata Party lost to the Trinamool Congress Party in West Bengal. Still, Modi’s ultra-nationalist party captured 80 seats in the state legislature out of 274, up from three seats won in 2016.
Dr. Rosemarie De Souza was in charge of Mumbai’s only infectious disease hospital during the first few months of the pandemic. She studied 700 patients with COVID who were admitted between March and May 2020; De Souza studied another group of patients admitted between May and November 2020. “Basically, in our study mortality increased with age,” De Souza said.
Elderly patients with kidney or lung disease had higher mortality rates. De Souza found the obesity or diabetes made little difference. Medicines like chloroquinine or anti-virals like remdesivir did not increase survival rates.
She said much of the country developed herd immunity from regular COVID-19 during the first wave. De Souza suspects one of the variants is responsible for the latest outbreak.
“Many young patients are coming (to hospitals) without any co-morbidity unlike in the first wave. And the mortality is very high and patients are coming (in) absolutely breathless,” she said.
Fortunately, none of De Souza’s patients, who got one or both shots of vaccine, have died. But thousands are dying because so few Indians have been vaccinated. De Souza treats her COVID patients with anticoagulants and oxygen.
Delhi is India’s capital city, 881 miles from Mumbai. The Yashoda Hospital and Research Centre operates several hospitals near Delhi; two are designated just for COVID patients.
The resurgence of the coronavirus began in Mumbai in March but quickly spread to Delhi and other Indian cities. The new surge was as unexpected as it is apocalyptic.
Critical supplies like oxygen, ventilators, and antivirals are almost impossible to find.
Yahsoda Hospital can only admit about 30 COVID patients a day; but doctors get thousands of requests daily and they have to refuse most of them.
“There’s nothing we can do until someone gets better or someone dies,” said Dr. Rajat Arora. “If I put up a thousand-bed hospital today, it would be full in an hour,” Arora told the New Yorker recently.
People are reportedly dying in hospital parking lots waiting to be admitted. Crematoriums are running around the clock and some have collapsed from the heat. Bodies are queued up for hours lying in the street awaiting their turn.
The United States, India, and Brazil report the highest number of cases worldwide; the US, Brazil, and India have the highest number of reported deaths.
This story was brought to you by the Blue Cross Foundation of California and Ethnic Media Services.
