Mishaal Arshad C.M.Undergroundnews
NEW DELHI: Straining against his weight, Shayam Narayan’s brothers haul him from a rickshaw onto a hospital trolley in India’s capital New Delhi.
Only a few minutes pass before they are given the news: he is already dead.
Narayan is one of the latest casualties of a second wave of the coronavirus sweeping across India. His brothers had first brought him to the hospital at 6 a.m. on Friday. But they said staff deemed him well enough to return home.
Ten hours later, his condition deteriorating, they came back. But it was too late to save him.
“The system is broken,” his younger brother Raj said.
Narayan, who had five children, died without being admitted to the hospital, or taken to its morgue, meaning his death is unlikely to be officially counted in the city’s rising toll.
For the second day running, the country’s overnight infection total was higher than any recorded anywhere in the world since the pandemic began last year, at 332,730.
Some 2,263 died, with over 300 of those in Delhi alone — figures that are almost certainly conservative.Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital, in the northeast of India’s capital, is one of many battling oxygen shortages and a lack of space. Patients die on trolleys outside, like Narayan.
The medical superintendent of the hospital was not immediately available for comment.
“Due to an exponential rise in COVID-19 cases in Delhi, all the hospitals are over-burdened,” a Delhi government spokesman said.
“In GTB Hospital, the patients are arriving via ambulances despite unavailability of beds. Despite this, the government is trying its best to give all patients treatment at some facility or the other.”
