At around 5:00 a.m. on June 5, Neelam, 30, Singh’s wife, more than 8 months pregnant, began having back pain and difficulty breathing.
However, because of suspicions that Neelam had Covid-19 symptoms, eight hospitals refused to admit her.
Singh, an Indian husband whose 8-month pregnant wife died because the hospital refused treatment.
Neelam’s death exposed the cruel reality of the Indian healthcare industry, when the whole system was on the brink of collapse due to Covid-19.
`From the beginning of the outbreak, the government underestimated nCoV,` said Harjit Singh Bhatti, a doctor at Man Manal Hospital in Delhi.
`Every day I see an increase in patients who cannot be hospitalized, many people die outside the hospital. Medical staff are exposed to countless numbers, the health system in Delhi is being exhausted. If action is not taken
India, one of the largest countries and strictest lockdowns in the world, began lifting the lockdown earlier this week, allowing shopping malls and places of worship to open after more than two months.
The number of Covid-19 cases in India is 298,000, increasing by 10,000 cases every day and surpassing the UK, becoming the fourth largest epidemic area in the world.
Singh, a factory worker in Khora Colony in Ghaziabad, took his wife to a government hospital in neighboring Noida.
They went to 8 hospitals, all of which were refused because they suspected Neelam had difficulty breathing due to Covid-19, even though they had not been tested.
`At the fourth hospital, I knelt down and begged them, saying I had gone everywhere this morning but they just said ‘we can’t treat her, she will die here,’` Singh said.
At the next hospital, they were so desperate that they paid for Neelam to be given oxygen in an ambulance.
`I didn’t dare go to the ambulance to face her. She kept telling me: ‘I can’t hold on much longer, please help me, I won’t do anything to help you’. At that time, I
But even the police couldn’t help her get a hospital bed.
Colleagues help a nurse put on protective gear at Max hospital, New Delhi, India.
`But when I got there, I pulled the oxygen mask off my wife’s face and discovered she was dead,` Singh said.
The consequences of Covid-19 in India, a poor and populous country that spends only 1% of GDP on health, are becoming clearer day by day.
The hospital morgue is overloaded.
Manish Sisodia, a Delhi leader, predicts the number of Covid-19 cases in the capital will increase to more than 500,000 by July, with the number of hospital beds also needing to increase from 9,000 to 80,000 to meet demand.
`For Delhi, this is a big difficulty that needs to be resolved if the number of infections continues to increase,` Sisodia said.
Balram Bhargava, director of the Indian Council of Medical Research, affirmed that India is definitely not in the stage of an outbreak of community transmission, although Delhi officials admitted that they have only identified the source of infection in 50% of cases.
`Any claim that there is no community transmission is nonsense. That is the only way for the government to escape criticism and avoid spending more money on hospitals and human resources,` he said.
Only 5 million Covid-19 tests have been performed in the country of 1.3 billion people.
Even Home Minister Amit Shah admitted that the $266 billion economic stimulus package announced by the government earlier this week `could have been a mistake, we could have failed` in the fight against the virus.
The situation is so bad that even money and connections cannot solve the problem.
`The bubble we were living in has burst,` said Rajiv Kakria, a consultant for the GK1 neighborhood.
