There’s no single reason for India’s catastrophic covid surge. Instead, it’s the result of basic mistakes and callous technocratic failures. On

What went so wrong with covid in India? Everything.

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2021-07-08 14:00:04

There’s no single reason for India’s catastrophic covid surge. Instead, it’s the result of basic mistakes and callous technocratic failures.

On April 21, Ashley Delaney brought his father-in-law to the Goa Medical College and Hospital, the largest public hospital in the small southwestern Indian state. The hospital was in chaos and the wards were packed, with all 708 covid beds occupied—so 69-year-old Joseph Paul Alvares, a cancer survivor, had to lie on a gurney for nearly three days for a bed to become available. The bathrooms were so filthy that many patients chose to wear adult diapers. And when one covid-positive man developed seizures, the hospital staff—seemingly unable to cope— tethered him to the bedposts with bandages. Delaney was so disturbed by what he saw that he decided to stay by his father-in-law’s side in case things took a turn for the worse. Soon enough, they did.

On the morning of April 28, several patients’ monitors started to flash and indicate that they were in distress, but the hospital staff didn’t respond. When Delaney went over to investigate, he saw that the patients—around 10 to 12 of them, as he later recalled—had died. He wasn’t a doctor, but it looked as if there had been a problem with the oxygen supplies. Delaney alerted several nurses and doctors, who told him that they had already complained to the administration but had been brushed aside. On May 2, the incident repeated itself. This time 12 patients died. On May 3, the number who died that night rose to 14. Delaney observed that in each case, a drop in oxygen had occurred between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. It seemed to him that oxygen supplies were running out night after night, causing patients to asphyxiate.