On Tuesday, as the second wave of Covid-19 continued surging across India, Gujarat reported 6,690 new cases and 67 deaths across the state ...
On Tuesday, as the second wave of Covid-19 continued surging across India, Gujarat reported 6,690 new cases and 67 deaths across the state – the highest single-day tallies since the start of the pandemic last year.
These official figures are grim in themselves, but the reality on the ground is much, much worse, video footage, news reports and interviews with those running crematoriums and burial grounds suggest.
In the past three days, almost every news outlet in Gujarat – be it print, television, English-language or Gujarati – has put the spotlight on the staggering mismatch between the government’s official Covid-19 death count and the number of dead being cremated or buried in cities.
In Ahmedabad, for instance, the state government had officially declared just 20 Covid-19 deaths on April 12. But Sandesh, a leading Gujarati newspaper, claimed that at least 63 people had died in just one government-run Covid-19 hospital in the city on the same day.
In a report published in Sandesh on Tuesday, the paper claimed that its journalists had arrived at the figure by camping outside Ahmedabad Civil Hospital’s 1,200-bed dedicated Covid-19 wing for 17 hours, counting every dead body being brought out of the morgue from midnight to 5 pm on April 12.
Last week, Chief Minister Vijay Rupani denied...
