India grieves 200K dead, with likely many more uncounted

India’s official death toll has passed 200,000, but the true number is likely far higher

NEW DELHI -- Three days after his coronavirus symptoms appeared, Rajendra Karan struggled to breathe. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, his son drove him to a government hospital in Lucknow, the capital of India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh. But the hospital wouldn’t let him in without a registration slip from the district’s chief medical officer. By the time the son got it, his father had died in the car, just outside the hospital doors. “My father would have been alive today if the hospital had just admitted him instead of waiting for a piece of paper,” Rohitas Karan said. Stories of deaths tangled in bureaucracy and system failure have become dismally common in India, where deaths on Wednesday officially surged past 200,000. But the figure is likely far lower than the true count. In India, mortality data was poor even before the pandemic, with most people dying at home and their deaths often going unregistered. The practice is particularly prevalent in rural areas, where the virus is now spreading fast. This is partly why the nation of nearly 1.4 billion has recorded fewer deaths than Brazil and Mexico, which have smaller populations and fewer confirmed COVID-19 cases.