In an India hit by an epidemic tsunami, thousands of patients, like him, are victims of a lack of hospital beds, oxygen and life-saving medicines.
At Guru Teg Bahadur (GTB) hospital, north-east of the capital New Delhi, Shyam Narayan and his family waited patiently, in a continuous stream of ambulances, rickshaws and other vehicles loaded with Covid-19 patients, waiting for a place. Inside, the beds can be occupied by three people at a time.
Shyam Narayan couldn’t even make it that far. He eventually walked through the door, but a few minutes later his body came out on a stretcher. Without life.
All night long, his family had been touring hospitals in search of a bed with oxygen, explains his brother Ram. “My brother has five children and the youngest is very small, what am I going to say to his wife?”.
The country, which has 1.3 billion inhabitants, breaks daily records for Covid cases and its health system cracks under the flood of patients. On Sunday, India recorded nearly 350,000 new contaminations and 2,767 deaths over 24 hours.
Distraught families
Shyam Narayan’s death may not even be counted. His body was taken away without any admission procedure.
The GTB hospital ensures that it is doing its best in the face of the crisis and the staff are working non-stop. At the entrance, a guard explains to distraught families that everything is full. Some stand in line, others grab a rickshaw and continue their desperate search.
Exhausted, 17-year-old Mohan Sharma supports his 65-year-old grandfather. He offers him water, comforts him when he coughs and tenderly adjusts his oxygen mask.
Mohan’s father died of coronavirus in that same queue, less than 24 hours earlier. “He was suffocating, we took off his protective mask and he was crying, he was saying + help, please help +”, says the young man. “But I couldn’t do anything. I just watched him die.”
Mohan did not have time to mourn his father, he had to quickly help his grandfather while his mother stayed at home to take care of the grandmother, who was positive for the coronavirus.
The family were able to find a bed for the grandfather. But the conditions were appalling: “There were three corpses next to him and he got scared, saying he was going to go through it. So I took him outside and he’s resting now,” Mohan explains.
The old man’s oxygen cylinder is almost empty. There is no guarantee that it can be replaced.
People returning from inside describe corridors cluttered with beds and stretchers occupied by two or three people.
“I saw three corpses in six minutes,” says Ravi Kumar, who managed to get his octogenarian grandfather admitted after waiting all night. “Inside there are no beds, just stretchers side by side with two patients on each.”
“A failure of the government”
The night before, Ravi Kumar’s grandfather had had to leave a private hospital that had run out of oxygen.
“It is a failure of the government. They have not improved the infrastructure since last year,” he continues. “If it’s like that in the capital of India, you can imagine how much worse the situation is in rural areas.”
Behind him, Irfan Salmani, clinging to his phone, desperately seeks help for his 40-year-old sister Monisha. She struggles to breathe, sitting on the floor in her yellow sari with an oxygen mask with the tube attached to nothing.
“I have been trying non-stop for three days, I go from one hospital to another. I have never seen anything so horrible in my life,” he says. “What can I do? I haven’t eaten or drunk anything since this morning. I face one refusal after another.”
At the head of the queue, a family pleads with the caretaker for the admission of one of its members.
A man is lying in the sun with an almost empty oxygen cylinder. He has a chance of survival: his family quickly connects a new bottle.
– .
