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India reported its highest daily death toll — 4,187 people — on Saturday, weeks into the world’s worst wave of coronavirus cases that’s leaving people without lifesaving hospital beds, oxygen and drugs.
In all, nearly 240,000 people in India are confirmed to have died from COVID-19, with reported infections topping 21 million.
It’s a bitter turn for India, which had managed to see cases decline over the winter. But by late March, a second wave swelled and now is ripping relentlessly through the country, with around 400,000 new cases and more than 3,500 deaths reported every day.
But as bad as the government’s official numbers are, they are almost certainly a vast undercount.
“There’s a shortage of tests,” Santosh Pandey, who resides near the holy city of Varanasi in northern India, told NPR in April. “Nobody’s getting tested, so the government’s numbers for our district are totally wrong.”
Crematoriums across India have said only a fraction of the bodies they receive each day are getting counted by the government.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is coming under increasing criticism for his handling of the crisis. He has not delivered a television address since April 20.
That same month, he did, however, hold a political rally with thousands of people crowded together; masks and distancing in short supply. And he refused to halt a huge Hindu pilgrimage that drew millions of people to bathe in the Ganges River.
The Lancet, a medical journal, in an editorial called Modi’s COVID-19 response “inexcusable” and a “self-inflicted national catastrophe.”
And some Indians feel a sense of abandonment.
Medical supply chains have broken and some hospitals have simply run of medical oxygen. Families have been tasked with finding their own cylinders for relatives desperate to breathe.
India’s urban centers, including its…
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