It’s difficult to watch," said a teary-eyed Shunty. Children who were 5 years old, 15 years old, 25 years old are being cremated. “No one in Delhi would have ever witnessed such a scene. Jitender Singh Shunty who runs a non-profit medical service, the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Sewa Dal, said as of Thursday afternoon 60 bodies had been cremated at the makeshift facility in the parking lot and 15 others were still waiting. People losing loved ones in the Indian capital, where 306 people have died of COVID-19 in the last 24 hours, are turning to makeshift facilities that are undertaking mass burials and cremations as crematoriums come under pressure. In Delhi alone, where hospitals are running out of medical oxygen supplies, the daily rise is over 26,000. India recorded the world’s highest daily tally of 314,835 coronavirus infections on Thursday, with the second wave of the pandemic crushing its weak health infrastructure. “I ran pillar to post but every crematorium had some reason … one said it had run out of wood," said Kumar, wearing a mask and squinting his eyes that were stinging from the smoke blowing from the burning pyres. On Thursday Kumar cremated his mother, who died of COVID-19, in a makeshift, mass cremation facility in a parking lot adjoining a crematorium in Seemapuri in northeast Delhi. Delhi resident Nitish Kumar was forced to keep his dead mother’s body at home for nearly two days while he searched for space in the city’s crematoriums - a sign of the deluge of death in India’s capital where coronavirus cases are surging.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |