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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Undocumented Tide Of Death Overwhelms Rural India As Cities Stabilise -Kavitha Iyer

Undocumented Tide Of Death Overwhelms Rural India As Cities Stabilise -Kavitha Iyer

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published Published on May 25, 2021   modified Modified on May 26, 2021

-Article-14.com

A surge of untested, undocumented, unmonitored Covid-19 infections in India’s villages is killing thousands, many times more than reported cases. With no access to big-city medical care or Twitter SOSs, millions are at risk.

Mumbai: It was past 10 pm when S H Mehdi, BAMS, saw off the last of the day’s 250-odd patients and settled down to speak over the phone. “Chaaron taraf fever phaili hui hai. (There are febrile patients across the region.)”

Each of his patients that day in Sarai Rasulpur village of western Uttar Pradesh’s Khatauli block in Muzaffarnagar district was running a temperature. That day alone, he urged almost 100 to get tested for Covid-19. Perhaps 10 would make the journey to Khatauli town, 8 km away, he told Article 14. It had been this way for four weeks.         

Nearly 1,500 km east of Khatauli, in West Bengal’s Birbhum district, ‘doctor’ Vishnu Salui said the last week of April was his busiest in 13 years of medical practice in Tarachi village, home to a large community of the Santhal tribe. Salui does not have a degree in medicine, but he saw 50 patients everyday, sometimes more, all reporting flu and diarrhoea, typical symptoms of Covid-19.

“Seven out of 10 I could cure, the rest I recommended a Covid test,” Salui, a paramedic, told Article 14. The nearest testing centres are in Mallarpur and Rampurhat towns, 7 km and 18 km away. “Those who were really ill or needed oxygen went to get tested,” said Salui. Most did not—going for a test would incur a day’s loss of wages.   

In Uttar Pradesh, a young farmer told Article 14 how he cremated his father on their farm, days after oxygen ran out in the hospital. In Rajasthan, a labourer said he carried his sick father around a Covid ward looking for a bed. In Maharashtra, some tribals refused to go to a city hospital though entire hamlets were down with severe flu symptoms. In an Odisha district town, a migrant worker back from Bengaluru was among the few who could use social media to get a hospital bed for his Covid-positive parents. In Bihar, relatives donned protective gear to themselves pack the corpse of a loved one.   

 

Mehdi and Salui, and other residents and practitioners in small towns and villages, spoke of patients who died before they could reach a hospital; black-marketeers of even ordinary fever medication; and acute shortages of hospital beds and oxygen in nearby towns. Salui is the only practitioner in his village of 1,500 people. By May, Mehdi and his son Kamal were the only doctors still practising in Sarai Rasulpur, donning protective gear to meet the crowds of patients outside their home-clinic by 6 am everyday.  

Strikingly similar stories emerge from across India’s rural districts and villages. Even as the pandemic’s second wave appears to plateau in the big cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Pune, a surge of untested, undocumented and unmonitored infections and deaths continues in the villages, where 800 million Indians, or 65% of the population, lives.

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Article-14.com, 25 May, 2021, https://www.article-14.com/post/undocumented-tide-of-death-overwhelms-rural-india-as-cities-stabilise


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