Coronavirus | Calamity in the capital

The COVID-19 wave in New Delhi has led to a spike in cases and deaths and put the healthcare system under severe strain. Nikhil M. Babu, Hemani Bhandari and Jatin Anand report on the negligence of the Central and Delhi governments which has led to a mad scramble for beds, oxygen, and space in cremation grounds

At 3 p.m. on April 24, a woman walks out of the main building of Jaipur Golden Hospital, Delhi, her eyes red from crying. She is in her thirties. Three family members have their arms around her. The woman is silent and keeps her head down. Her relative, though, snaps out of her shock and cries, “He has been murdered!” The woman crosses the hospital gate, sits on the pavement and starts wailing. Her 37-year-old husband, Dinesh, a cabin crew member in an airline, was among the 20 critically ill COVID-19 patients at the hospital who had died the previous night over an “oxygen crisis”, according to the hospital authorities. “These people killed him. They didn’t give him oxygen. They didn’t tell us anything about an oxygen shortage,” says a family member. The woman has two children aged three and five years. It is a summer of fear and grief in the national capital. This wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has hit Delhi with tremendous force. The number of daily new cases and deaths is as high as 28,000 and 300, respectively, every day. There is sickness in the air and death too. The health system is being stretched to its limits, often cracking under the burden of cases. Many people with symptoms of COVID-19 are lining up outside testing centres as early as 4 a.m. Every day, the sick travel to about five-six hospitals in search of a bed. Many of them die outside hospitals just waiting for admission. Inside the hospitals, apart from deaths due to the infection and related complications, some lives have been lost due to oxygen shortages. The queues are long outside hospitals and they are long outside cremation grounds too. Pyres burn through the night.