Mass Cremations in New Delhi, COVID-19 Plagues India

COVID-19 has been spreading across India like wildfire, so much that the city of New Delhi’s crematoriums has been filled with those taken by Coronavirus. Those that aren’t dead are slowly suffering in hospitals with little medication and packed hallways.

Statistics from The New York Times show that roughly 350,000 people are diagnosed with COVID-19 every day, more than any other country in the world, since the start of the Pandemic. “I don’t know how I got it”, an anonymous citizen told the Times, He continued to recount how much India has changed around him, “you just catch a whiff of this…”. The same individual is too sick to continue speaking and the medicine he needs to recover is nowhere in the country.

In New Delhi, Coronavirus runs rampant, seeing an increase as high as 38 percent according to the New York Times. This was not the case one month ago when the rate was under 3 percent, now hospitals were capped at full capacity, and medicine needed to treat patients-both infected and non-infected-are at an all-time low. The citizens of India are reaching out to their prime minister Narendra Modi, desperate for him to send oxygen, vaccines, and aid.

Despite this development is a surprise for most experts, some were not shocked. India contains over 1.4 billion people in its borders, the rural areas are tightly packed, and the majority of its citizens are rather poor. Given these factors Coronavirus was able to spread very easily.

Experts suspect that a new variant of COVID-19, “the double mutant”, is responsible for this rapid surge. This variant of COVID-19 is still being studied by scientists, what is known is that it has a possibility of developing two traits: it may be slightly immune to the vaccine and it may be slightly more contagious. A Reporter from the New York Times interviewed those infected with this new strain and told them that they still got “seriously ill” despite getting the vaccine twice.

New Delhi is still under lockdown, and Indian Air Force delivered Oxygen tanks from Singapore to the country Monday evening. However, epidemiologists told the Times that the infection rate will increase to 500,000 a day and 1,000,000 dead citizens by August.