- Mar 17, 2015
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The night sky glows from mass cremations. Sickness and death are everywhere.
We've been here for more than a year since the beginning, and it's been really scary. We've seen the health care system collapse around us. We've had many friends get sick. We've had some friends who died....
...what we're seeing now is, like, the nightmare that we really wanted to avoid...
...1.4 billion people, many of them living in close quarters, a perfect recipe for disaster for a highly contagious disease. And in many cases, there just hasn't been good response, good help if you get sick. There's - sometimes it's not clear where you can go. Hospitals have been running out of oxygen, and people have been dying in their beds in hospitals, gasping for air because the oxygen supply ran out. Medicines are in really short supply. And it just - this wave... is so overwhelming that there's just been too many sick people for the system to cope.
You describe in your reporting that the skies are filled with smoke from cremations. Can you give us a sense of that?
GETTLEMAN: Yeah, it was really disturbing. So this was a few weeks ago when the cases were surging in Delhi, and the number of people dying around the city was the highest it's ever been. We don't even know the real numbers. The numbers that are officially reported, we widely - are widely believed to be gross underestimations. But a few weeks ago, when the virus was really tearing through New Delhi, I would get up in the morning, I would open the sliding door for our apartment and I'd step out on a small balcony that we have, and the first thing that I could smell was smoke. And there were these massive cremations happening across the city where there were dozens of bodies being burned at the same time. And it was creating this air pollution. You could smell it in the morning. And it was just this, like, really - it was just, like, sad and upsetting. And you just felt like you were in the middle of a place that was just overcome with death. And cremations are the way that most Hindus pay their final respects and perform last rites. And this has been the situation across India. We're watching these cremation grounds really closely because they happen to be the most reliable indicator of how widespread this sickness and death really is.
GROSS: Oh, because people can't go to doctors or hospitals. The hospitals are turning people away. So you can't rely on them for an accurate count.
GETTLEMAN: We've gotten information about certain areas in the country. We spent a lot of time researching this where we would look at the official numbers from a city or a district and then compare them with information we were getting from these cremation grounds. And there's a very specific way that cremation grounds are supposed to handle COVID bodies. They do it in isolation. The workers wear these PPE suits, which are, like, sweltering. You know, it's over 100 degrees some days in India. And these cremation workers are just dripping with sweat behind, you know, these protective clothing. And there's counts that are happening at these places. And they're recording how many suspected COVID patients are being given last rites. And those numbers are way higher than what these district officials are reporting. And we don't know if it's because they're just not testing enough - so if somebody doesn't have a positive test, even if it's suspected, that's not considered COVID - or if they're intentionally keeping these numbers down because they don't want to give the impression that things are out of control in their area. We just don't know. But we've done research at The New York Times and Indian media has done a lot of research, and the numbers just don't match up. And experts we're talking to think that the real numbers of people who are dying every day in India is two to five times what's being reported.
...(continues)
COVID Is The 'Nightmare We Really Wanted To Avoid,' India-Based Journalist Says
We've been here for more than a year since the beginning, and it's been really scary. We've seen the health care system collapse around us. We've had many friends get sick. We've had some friends who died....
...what we're seeing now is, like, the nightmare that we really wanted to avoid...
...1.4 billion people, many of them living in close quarters, a perfect recipe for disaster for a highly contagious disease. And in many cases, there just hasn't been good response, good help if you get sick. There's - sometimes it's not clear where you can go. Hospitals have been running out of oxygen, and people have been dying in their beds in hospitals, gasping for air because the oxygen supply ran out. Medicines are in really short supply. And it just - this wave... is so overwhelming that there's just been too many sick people for the system to cope.
You describe in your reporting that the skies are filled with smoke from cremations. Can you give us a sense of that?
GETTLEMAN: Yeah, it was really disturbing. So this was a few weeks ago when the cases were surging in Delhi, and the number of people dying around the city was the highest it's ever been. We don't even know the real numbers. The numbers that are officially reported, we widely - are widely believed to be gross underestimations. But a few weeks ago, when the virus was really tearing through New Delhi, I would get up in the morning, I would open the sliding door for our apartment and I'd step out on a small balcony that we have, and the first thing that I could smell was smoke. And there were these massive cremations happening across the city where there were dozens of bodies being burned at the same time. And it was creating this air pollution. You could smell it in the morning. And it was just this, like, really - it was just, like, sad and upsetting. And you just felt like you were in the middle of a place that was just overcome with death. And cremations are the way that most Hindus pay their final respects and perform last rites. And this has been the situation across India. We're watching these cremation grounds really closely because they happen to be the most reliable indicator of how widespread this sickness and death really is.
GROSS: Oh, because people can't go to doctors or hospitals. The hospitals are turning people away. So you can't rely on them for an accurate count.
GETTLEMAN: We've gotten information about certain areas in the country. We spent a lot of time researching this where we would look at the official numbers from a city or a district and then compare them with information we were getting from these cremation grounds. And there's a very specific way that cremation grounds are supposed to handle COVID bodies. They do it in isolation. The workers wear these PPE suits, which are, like, sweltering. You know, it's over 100 degrees some days in India. And these cremation workers are just dripping with sweat behind, you know, these protective clothing. And there's counts that are happening at these places. And they're recording how many suspected COVID patients are being given last rites. And those numbers are way higher than what these district officials are reporting. And we don't know if it's because they're just not testing enough - so if somebody doesn't have a positive test, even if it's suspected, that's not considered COVID - or if they're intentionally keeping these numbers down because they don't want to give the impression that things are out of control in their area. We just don't know. But we've done research at The New York Times and Indian media has done a lot of research, and the numbers just don't match up. And experts we're talking to think that the real numbers of people who are dying every day in India is two to five times what's being reported.
...(continues)
COVID Is The 'Nightmare We Really Wanted To Avoid,' India-Based Journalist Says
