prasad1
Active member
She may not be a popular person In the Hindu, Nationalist crowd but she has a following outside India. This piece is an opinion on the basis of her experience.
For 15 months I have been heartbroken.
I’ve been on the front line reporting the covid -19 pandemic from across India. Heartbroken, first by witnessing the searing impact of the 2020 national lockdown on India’s poorest citizens.
My psyche was increasingly bruised as I reported from ICUs, cremation grounds and graveyards to chronicle how covid’s second wave ravaged my entirely unprepared country.
On April 27, the news hit home for me in the worst way. I lost my father, Speedy Dutt, to covid.
My father was a man of science. He was horrified at the lack of preparedness for what all experts warned was coming. His infection seemed mild and initially manageable at home and when his fever spiked, I promised him I’d get him back from the hospital after a few days.
I failed.
Because of India’s overstretched health system, we had to use a private ambulance to rush him to the hospital. The so-called ambulance was nothing more than a repurposed old car, without a paramedic or a stretcher. It had a single oxygen cylinder in the back. The driver assured me that the oxygen cylinder was fine. It was only when we reached the hospital that we discovered that my father had not gotten enough high-flow oxygen and as a result, his oxygen levels had plummeted. He went straight into ICU, and was on a ventilator for two days. After five days, he passed away at the age of 84.
I am haunted by unrelenting sorrow and doubts about what I could have done differently.
I am also angry, filled with rage at a government whose top officials continue to lie to the Indian people about the scale of the calamity.
This week, India’s Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Supreme Court there is no oxygen deficit in India. Two days after his comments, 12 people, including a doctor, died in the ICU of a covid hospital as oxygen supply ran short. It’s the third such set of fatalities in 10 days.
Meanwhile, Indians are dying on the streets. One hour from the capital, outside a gurudwara, a Sikh place of worship, in scenes straight from an apocalyptical science fiction film, an oxygen “langar” — has replaced the free food normally distributed at the shrine. Tearful, desperate people from all walks of life who have been turned away from hospitals, form scrums to access oxygen. A cylinder is strapped to their mouths for half an hour at a time, rationing out a few moments of extra life.
The official death count is 222,000, but my reporting from funeral grounds informs me the number is at least four times higher. In Delhi, the undertaker at just one site told me he cremated 30 bodies at the peak of the first wave in 2020; now he has been burning more than 100 bodies every night.
For 15 months I have been heartbroken.
I’ve been on the front line reporting the covid -19 pandemic from across India. Heartbroken, first by witnessing the searing impact of the 2020 national lockdown on India’s poorest citizens.
My psyche was increasingly bruised as I reported from ICUs, cremation grounds and graveyards to chronicle how covid’s second wave ravaged my entirely unprepared country.
On April 27, the news hit home for me in the worst way. I lost my father, Speedy Dutt, to covid.
My father was a man of science. He was horrified at the lack of preparedness for what all experts warned was coming. His infection seemed mild and initially manageable at home and when his fever spiked, I promised him I’d get him back from the hospital after a few days.
I failed.
Because of India’s overstretched health system, we had to use a private ambulance to rush him to the hospital. The so-called ambulance was nothing more than a repurposed old car, without a paramedic or a stretcher. It had a single oxygen cylinder in the back. The driver assured me that the oxygen cylinder was fine. It was only when we reached the hospital that we discovered that my father had not gotten enough high-flow oxygen and as a result, his oxygen levels had plummeted. He went straight into ICU, and was on a ventilator for two days. After five days, he passed away at the age of 84.
I am haunted by unrelenting sorrow and doubts about what I could have done differently.
I am also angry, filled with rage at a government whose top officials continue to lie to the Indian people about the scale of the calamity.
This week, India’s Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Supreme Court there is no oxygen deficit in India. Two days after his comments, 12 people, including a doctor, died in the ICU of a covid hospital as oxygen supply ran short. It’s the third such set of fatalities in 10 days.
Meanwhile, Indians are dying on the streets. One hour from the capital, outside a gurudwara, a Sikh place of worship, in scenes straight from an apocalyptical science fiction film, an oxygen “langar” — has replaced the free food normally distributed at the shrine. Tearful, desperate people from all walks of life who have been turned away from hospitals, form scrums to access oxygen. A cylinder is strapped to their mouths for half an hour at a time, rationing out a few moments of extra life.
The official death count is 222,000, but my reporting from funeral grounds informs me the number is at least four times higher. In Delhi, the undertaker at just one site told me he cremated 30 bodies at the peak of the first wave in 2020; now he has been burning more than 100 bodies every night.
