COVID sick in India ‘go under trees to raise oxygen levels’

With no doctor or health facility in Mewla Gopalgarh in Uttar Pradesh state, villagers practise alternative medicine.

In a village in northern India engulfed by COVID-19, the sick lie on cots under a tree, glucose drips hanging from a branch. Cows graze all around, while syringes and empty medicine packets are strewn on the ground. There is no doctor or health facility in Mewla Gopalgarh in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, a 90-minute drive from the national capital. There is a government hospital nearby but it has no available beds and the villagers say they cannot afford private clinics. Instead, village practitioners of alternative medicine have set up an open-air clinic where they distribute glucose and other remedies to patients with symptoms of COVID-19.