![]() “I was taken to the primary health centre but there was no facility for testing there. ![]() He was refused treatment at the district hospital because he did not have a Covid-negative report. In Uttar Pradesh, despite there being 135 hospitals that deal with Covid cases, according to its Health Department, but a lack of testing is taking its toll.įarmer Amar Jeet Singh, 47, from Navgava village in Lakhmipur Kheri district, developed a liver infection and struggled to get tested. The government is underestimating the pandemic and trying to hide the data Dr Harjit Singh Bhatti At the best of times, it struggles to deal with viral fevers or dengue outbreaks. It has only one bed and just under 4 doctors per 10,000 people according to the 2019 National Health Profile. In Bihar, one of India’s poorest states where around a third of people live below the poverty line, 90% of the population lives in villages. Both have extremely fragile medical services.Ī woman leans against a stretcher holding her husband in the corridor of the emergency ward of a hospital in Bhagalpur, in the eastern state of Bihar. This relative control will be difficult to replace in large, sprawling states like Uttar Pradesh, with 200 million people, and it’s southern neighbour, Bihar, with 104 million people. That’s thanks to the fact that 80% of doctors and 60% of hospitals are in urban areas. The way the pandemic will play out in rural India, says public health experts, will be very different from the cities where, though it is still raging, doctors and health officials have got the measure of the beast, to some degree at least. Kerala, home to coffee and tea plantations, had previously been hailed as a “model” for getting a grip on the pandemic fairly early. Photograph: RS Iyer/APĪt the other end of the country concern about rural outbreaks worried many in the southern state of Kerala, where a wedding and a funeral attended by one family in one of the state’s most remote villages, Valad, led to 236 new cases. The state had been praised for its initial response to the virus. “People in the rural areas are hiding their symptoms and are not coming forward to get tested even when the testing van is reaching the village,” said Dr Ravindra Sharma, a senior medical officer in Lakhmipur Kheri district, in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, which neighbours Uttarakhand. Virus stigmaĪnecdotal evidence also suggests that daily wage labourers will not reveal their symptoms for fear of separation from their families, the stigma, and losing their wages by being quarantined. Since the deaths will be spread out across huge geographical districts, some as big as 10,000 sq km (London is 1,572 sq km), Muliyil says the real scale of the human tragedy will only emerge much later, if at all. That is the reality in rural India where life expectancy is 65.” With limited resources, their families will not rush an elderly person to hospital if they have a fever,” said Muliyil. “This group, and the elderly, are more prone to getting the virus. I can’t sleep at night when I think of what might have happened if we hadn’t caught those four cases,” said Rajan Singh Negi, the village head of Khankari who organised the health camp. If my little outpost can get four cases, then it can sneak into every village in the country. ![]() The country seems to be entering a dangerous new phase of rising infections in small towns and villages such as Khankari. With a mild fever and an upset stomach, Upreti was taken to a quarantine facility the following night.Īs India’s positive cases hovered around 2.4m, there are growing fears that the virus’s impact on rural communities could be devastating. We don’t even need to go shopping for vegetables because we grow our own,” he said. To his surprise, Upreti’s name appeared on the list of four villagers who tested positive. If my little outpost can get four cases, then it can sneak into every village in the country Rajan Singh Negi Apart from checking for monsoon-related ailments, local health officials took swabs for Covid-19. “I went for the heck of it, I had no symptoms but thought why not?,” said Upreti. On 7 August, he attended a health camp organised by the village council.
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