India Is Counting Thousands of Daily COVID Deaths. How Many Is It Missing?
MUMBAI — Santosh Pandey's wife is the head of their village, population about 1,600, near the holy city of Varanasi, in northern India. He sometimes answers her phone. So he's up to date on what's happening in town.
And what's happening these days, he says, is horrific.
Fifty people from his village, Ashapur, and a neighboring one, Tilamapur, have died in the past two weeks. Most of them died at home, gasping for breath, with fevers. But only five or six of them were officially counted as COVID-19 deaths, Pandey says.
"There's a shortage of coronavirus tests. Nobody's getting tested! So the government's numbers for our district are totally wrong," he told NPR on a crackly phone line from his village. "If you're able to get tested, results come after five days."
By that time, some of them are already gone – cremated on the banks of the Ganges River nearby.
This village's ordeal is not atypical. Across India, there are shortages of testing kits, hospital beds, medical oxygen and antiviral drugs, as a severe second wave of the pandemic – more than any country on any day since the pandemic began.
