DM Monitoring
NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said last week that the COVID-19 pandemic that had claimed over 280,000 lives across the country was rapidly spreading in its rural areas. He urged people living in the countryside to take precautions, timely testing and medication if feeling ill, and in particular, a shot of vaccine in the arm.
Although Vinod K. Paul, a recognized Indian medical scientist and public health exponent, said Tuesday that “there is stabilization” and “the pandemic is shrinking” as active cases are going down while hospital discharges are going up, deaths are still growing, and villages, in particular, are plagued.
THOSE WHO DIED
People living near the banks of the Ganga in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have been witnessing the ghastly sight of bloated and decomposing bodies in water and along the banks, where over 2,000 bodies were reportedly found.
Authorities appealed to people not to dump bodies to the water and intensified police patrolling along the riverbed to stop people from doing that. Uttar Pradesh government even issued full-page advertisements in all newspapers on Sunday, urging residents not to dump corpses in water while saying that 5,000 Indian rupees (68 U.S. dollars) would be given to anyone who cannot afford the last rites of their loved ones.
On Saturday evening, P. Chidambaram, a Congress opposition leader, said his party had independently cross-checked the reports of vernacular Gujarati daily regarding the government’s under-counting of its COVID-19 deaths. He called on all states to release figures on the number of death certificates issued.
“We have a strong suspicion that the government of India, in conjunction with some state governments, is suppressing the true number of new infections and COVID-19 related deaths,” said Chidambaram.
According to the ministry, over 184 million people have been vaccinated so far across the country since the beginning of the vaccination drive on Jan. 16.
The majority of the beneficiaries have received only one dose of the required two, and experts say most of the testing and vaccination centers have been set up in urban areas or towns.
An Indian government panel has recommended widening the interval between two doses of anti-COVID-19 COVISHIELD vaccine to 12-16 weeks from four to eight weeks due to the shortage of vaccines, the second time in three months such interval has been widened.
“First, it was 4 weeks for the second dose, then 6-8 weeks, and now we are told 12-16 weeks. Is this because there are not enough stocks of the vaccines for all who are eligible or because professional scientific advice says so?” another leader of the Congress Jairam Ramesh wrote on social media.
