Umesh Rajak had to reportedly spend the night of July 11 on the footpath inside the premises of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences...
Umesh Rajak had to reportedly spend the night of July 11 on the footpath inside the premises of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Patna because the hospital did not have any beds to spare. Rajak, who was a senior bureaucrat in Bihar’s home department, died days later of Covid-19 related complications.
Videos of Rajak lying on the footpath at night, his wife running around and crying for help, became an ominous warning of what possibly lay ahead. If a senior state official could not find a hospital bed, what chance did the common man stand? Several people who could leave for states with better medical facilities did, anticipating the worst.
Even government officials said things could only get worse from there, considering Bihar’s infamously beleaguered health infrastructure. “Every state has a carrying capacity,” a senior state bureaucrat told Scroll.in at the time. “That capacity has been breached in Bihar.”
The worst avoided?
Cut to October: it appears most of the Covid-19 related doomsday predictions for the state did not come true and the panic of July has all but waned. The state has just over 11,000 active cases and its reported case fatality rate of 0.5 % is one of the lowest in the country. According to Ragini Mishra, Bihar’s state...
