India has been around for a long time in a tsunami of corona infection. The country’s second wave reached its peak in early May, and according to statistics is on its way down. Nevertheless, there are still enormous numbers of infections every day.
On Saturday, more than 165,000 new infections were registered, the day before the number was almost 174,000.
Large religious gatherings, the reopening of public places and political rallies were quickly pointed out as the reason for the increase in infection in April. In particular, a religious gathering is pointed out; Kumbh Mela.
Ashish Jha, rector of the School of Public Health at Brown University, has stated that Kumbh Mela was possibly “the biggest super-spreading event in the history of the pandemic”, writes The Guardian.
Earlier in May stamped as well BBC the festival as a super-spreader event, and referred to reports of participants testing positive after returning home.
Epidemiologist Lilit Kant tells the British broadcaster that large groups of people without masks, singing by the river, created an ideal environment for the virus to spread quickly.
Sounds the alarm: – We have to act now
– Has brought us a disaster
Millions of Hindu pilgrims traveled to swim in the Ganges River, and many returned home with corona infection, writes The Guardian.
One of these was Gopal Singh from the Vidisha district of Madhya Pradesh. He traveled with around 100 others from surrounding villages. Collected on two buses, they traveled down to the festival.
While there, he saw people getting sick, and on the way home, many of his fellow passengers complained of fever and diarrhea. He insisted on a coronate test on his return, and four days later it returned positive.
The medical picture is astonishing: – A tsunami
– After they returned from Kumbh, the cases increased to over 30 in a few days, says Ragu Raj Dangi, leader of Singh’s village.
Singh’s neighbor, a mother of two, eventually developed a fever. She was first treated by a local doctor, but was admitted to an intensive care unit when her oxygen level became critically low.
She died, and Singh says he has a very bad conscience.
– Our stubbornness and superstitious beliefs have brought us a disaster.
He says that he feels weak, but that the thought of anyone who may have been infected “because of people like him” is worse.
Another example is the small town of Gyaraspur, where 60 of the 83 who traveled to the festival tested positive when they returned home. It writes Washington Post, which refers to Abbas Zaidi, a doctor and local official.
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Infection rates in the air
The festival, where the believers bathe in the Ganges, is held in four places; In Allahabad, Nasik, Ujjain and Haridwar. In the town of Haridwar, tens of thousands gathered this year, and over 2,600 infected people were registered, according to the BBC.
The festival was shorter this year than usual, but local authorities said it was difficult to get people to keep their distance.
– Covid-19 explodes in Asia
On April 12, the first day of the festival, more than three million people took a bath in the Ganges. This was also the day India passed Brazil, which landed the second most corona cases, when 168,000 new infections were registered.
National infection rates reached new heights in the coming weeks.
In Uttarakhand, the state where the festival took place, one can also see that the infection rates went up. In early April, 500 new cases were reported every day. By the end of the month, it had risen in the air, to almost 6,000, writes Washington Post.
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