Six months after the start of the pandemic-as the developed world
tries to restore some semblance of normalcy-the virus is arriving with a
vengeance in India's vast hinterland.
The novel
coronavirus seemed like a distant problem in Boisar, a small factory town about
two hours from Mumbai, until Daniel Tribhuvan died.
The 35-year-old
tutor started feeling feverish in April, while bringing his father home from a
chemotherapy appointment in the Indian financial capital. When a test confirmed
Tribhuvan was infected, the local health system’s reaction was shambolic. After
he checked into a public hospital, the first thing they did was try to pawn him
off to a private facility in Mumbai. The ambulance turned around halfway when
they discovered he couldn’t pay. Back at the public hospital, a doctor didn’t
see him for three days, and when an elderly man occupying a bed nearby died,
his body wasn’t collected for 12 hours. After a week, Tribhuvan’s blood-oxygen
levels were dangerously low. He died on May 17, becoming Boisar’s first
confirmed fatality from Covid-19.
“I think he would
have survived if the system was good,” Samuel Tribhuvan, Daniel’s older
brother, said in a recent interview at Boisar’s local administrative office,
inside a rundown building that also houses a liquor store and a portrait
studio. “This is the worst place where we could get the coronavirus.”
Six months after
the start of the pandemic—as the developed world tries to restore some
semblance of normalcy—the virus is arriving with a vengeance in India’s vast
hinterland, where 70% of its more than 1.3 billion citizens live. The country
is now adding more than 80,000 confirmed infections per day, with about 71,000
deaths so far, numbers experts say are likely being under-counted. On Monday it
galloped past Brazil to become the world’s second-biggest outbreak, a sobering
preview of what could happen once the coronavirus spreads in earnest across
other poor, densely populated places from Nigeria to Myanmar. With such a vast
reservoir of potential hosts and minimal ability to contain infections, it
seems inevitable that India will at some point overtake the U.S. to have the
most cases globally.
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