← Back Published on

India’s Covid Death Count: Why Villages May Explain High Figure

On the second Wednesday of April 2021, Bakul Vadher left work at his shoe repairing business early, as he felt himself overcome with hot flushes. He had been persisting through a recent cold and cough to continue to bring an income to his family, despite his wife’s concerns and wishes for him to see a doctor.

The coronavirus had overcome its peak in the country and with a steady recovery rate and the recent rollout of vaccines a few months ago, Bakul saw no need to worry, until today.

As he ate through his tiffin lunch, he found himself not being able to taste the food, the tell-tell symptom of Covid-19. Giving into his wife’s wishes the two visited the local clinic in Porbander where in which a doctor suggested that he test for the virus. The results returned positive.

“He stayed in his bedroom at home to quarantine. His family were providing everything he needed to isolate, like food and drink. After the seven days he still wasn’t any better and he had started experiencing breathing problems,” explained Jaysukh Vadher, Bakul’s cousin.

The couple retuned to the local hospital as Bakul’s condition worsened but the hospital was not able to provide any medical assistance as they were facing a shortage of oxygen. They suggested that Bakul and his wife should go to a private hospital to seek help.

Like many of India’s citizens who reside in rural villages, for Bakul, private hospital prices are unaffordable against his low income. The couple stressed about whether to go, but as Bakul found his shortness of breath worsening, they decided that it was the only option they had. His wife called for an ambulance to take him to the private hospital.

“During the journey, he had passed away in the ambulance,” told Vadher.

While India officials claim that the country’s covid death count totals at almost 500,000, the World Health Organization (WHO) has released recent data suggesting that the real figure could be 10 times this. Of these 5 million fatalities, most occurred during India’s second and most deadly wave in April 2021.

According to the BBC, in India “about half the total deaths occur at home, especially in villages “. Economic inequalities in these rural areas and poor quality of state funded healthcare could be reason for the country’s high figure.

On Bakul’s potential for recovery, Vadher said: “If he had received the right treatment and had the money, he might have been able to survive, but he didn’t. He wasn’t in the right financial position to go to a private hospital but if he had the oxygen the first time or he had gotten to the private hospital quicker he might have recovered”.

The government’s reluctance to release all Covid data and its true Covid-19 death count has been heavily criticized by many. Motivations for holding back official information has also been questioned.

“Modi [India’s prime minister] didn’t do enough to protect the people in villages. If we had enough equipment and medicine, then I reckon the death rate would have been half of what it is,” Vadher concluded.

Equipment shortages from government hospitals appear to have been a recurring situation in the death of villagers suffering from the virus. In the same village as Bakul in India’s province of Gujarat, Chetena Parmar and her husband found themselves in a similar situation.

Her husband Prakesh had begun experiencing fever like symptoms. After consulting a doctor at the local clinic, he was prescribed medicine to help bring it down but after three days his fever returned.

“After he got a high temperature again, he was admitted to hospital. From that hospital they said they had to take him to a different hospital in the city, Rajkot because they didn’t have the equipment to treat him. They took him in an ambulance to the hospital at midnight and he arrived in the early morning,” explained Parmar.

She and their children arrived shortly after but were refused permission to stay or even visit him, so they travelled back home.

“The next day we got a call from the hospital telling us that he was gone and that we should tell the rest of the family.

“We weren’t even allowed to say goodbye after, he was sent straight to the crematorium. We have young children who don’t have their father anymore. They were very upset. He just had a fever for three days and then he was gone,” she sobbed as she recalled the trauma.

Over an eight-month period after Prakash’s death, his other two brother too tragically passed from Covid-19. Parmar says that the great loss in their family has left her feeling alone now.

Similarly, to Vadher, Parmar said: “If he had received better treatment from the government hospital, he would have survived. When we went to the local clinic, they didn’t do enough but if we had gone to a private one then things would have been different. “

In cases where equipment did not appear to be the issue, government clinics still failed to provide sufficient medical assistance.

In the same village, Aashish Yadav’s father’s symptoms were dismissed due to his pre-existing conditions. His father had a history of strokes and had been recovering from his recent one, but he began to feel sick to the point where he did not want to leave his bed at all.

“At night, he didn’t want to even leave his bed to go to the toilet, so he’d go there. After that his health got worse over the next few days, so we took him for a check-up at the local clinic to see what was wrong,” explained Yadav.

The doctors dismissed the covid being a cause but when Yadav took his father to have a CT scan completed, the results showed that he did in fact have the virus.

His father’s condition worsened as he began to lose his appetite and stopped eating. He was then admitted to hospital briefly.

“The hospital said there wasn’t a difference whether he was there or at home. They said there wasn’t much they could do. They told us to do what we wanted and do what we could to help,”

Yadav’s father was discharged and returned back home. A week later he died.

“The treatment in government hospitals were free but we didn’t get any good treatment. Only the basic requirements were free,” explained Yadav.

Over the course of the second coronavirus wave, local clinics in villages became particularly overwhelmed. Critics have claimed that a contributing reason for this is due to privatization of the healthcare system. As most are not able to turn to private clinics, most had to rely on underfunded local hospitals.

During this time another villager, Amruta Reghani’s husband also contracted the virus. Whilst he fortunately recovered, she will never forget the landscape of the local clinics.

“All the hospitals were full. Some patients were even being temporarily looked after in the building gardens and school halls. There wasn’t enough oxygen so more and more people were dying. If we had more resources, less people would have died,” argued Reghani.

As India state officials slams WHO for it’s true data claim, the chances are we may never know the real scale of covid deaths in the country. However, with or without the right figure, the consensus seems that better quality healthcare provided by the Government could have significantly reduced the number of tragedies and the consequent anguish shared amongst millions of families.

Edit this block to edit the article content or add new blocks...