Gruesome COVID death images from India - Yes, a resurgence could happen here!

COVID Alert redux!  Two echo opinions published in The New York Times: Yes it can happen in the US, too. 

With the COVID virus variant infecting India, the dominant strain is now in the US and showing up among those who are unvaccinated.

What do unvaccinated people not get about their increased risk of illness and death when they choose to refuse the COVID vaccine?

Gruesome! Corpses wrapped in shrouds were exposed along the banks of the Ganges River in Shringverpur. (Credit...Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images)

INDIA- Kunal Kamra, an enormously popular stand-up comedian in India, puts all jokes aside and takes a serious look at his government’s handling of the pandemic.

His assessment is withering: He accuses the nation’s leadership, especially an overconfident Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of putting political vanity before common sense and opening the door to a devastating resurgence of coronavirus infections.

India has been struggling amid a second COVID wave, which has sickened millions, killed tens of thousands and overwhelmed the nation’s health care system. At the peak of the crisis, new infections numbered about 400,000 a day, a record-breaking pace. Since then, the daily counts of infections and deaths have dropped. But Mr. Kamra says that had Mr. Modi and other political leaders responded more quickly and more effectively, a lot of lives and heartache would have been spared. “My people are needlessly dying,” Mr. Kamra says. “Our government has blood on its hands.”

LUCKNOW, India-  "Returning the dead...." echo opinion by Om Guar: — The Ganges, or Ganga, is the holiest of India’s rivers, and most Hindus believe that dipping their body in it will purify their soul. But when the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit this spring, the river also became Exhibit A for the Modi administration’s failures and deceptions.

The northern state of Bihar recently revised its death toll for April and May from 5,424 to 9,375. Private agencies tasked with conducting coronavirus tests at Kumbh Mela, a Hindu religious festival in northern India that attracted millions of pilgrims in April — and turned out to be a coronavirus superspreader event — reportedly falsified some 100,000 results.

The second wave of infections appears to be ebbing, but the country is struggling to process the staggering toll — nearly 380,000 people dead, the vast majority since just March — hobbled by the continuing obfuscation of both local and central authorities. But the holy Ganges does not lie.

On May 12, villagers in Buxar, a district in Bihar, found bloated and disfigured corpses floating in the river. Some 100 bodies were fished out there and in a district upstream, Ghazipur. A local senior police officer said the bodies had traveled downriver from Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

The national editor of Dainik Bhaskar, a Hindi-language newspaper that sells about five and a half million copies a day across India, mostly to readers in small towns and villages sent 30 reporters and photojournalists to walk the banks of the Ganges in major cities and districts in Uttar Pradesh.

Reporters counted 2,000 bodies on May 12 and 13 alone as they traveled 700 miles along the river. The bodies weren’t only floating in it; on some days, 65 or 70 were washing up on its shores. Yet by our calculations, based on official data, the state authorities claim that just 7,826 people died from Covid-19 from April 1 to May 13.

Shringverpur, a small village in southern Uttar Pradesh, is considered holy for its association with Lord Rama, a Hindu deity and the protagonist of the epic poem “Ramayana.” Our reporters saw many bodies buried just a yard apart; hundreds of saffron shrouds wrapped around the corpses were poking up from the ground. 

Poor villagers who couldn’t afford to buy wood to cremate their kin had sought some solace by burying them near a sacred site.

After more reporting, we estimated that between mid-April and mid-May some 4,000 corpses had been placed in shallow pits by the river along a stretch of less than one mile.

We might never have heard of this tragedy but for the weather. 

Rains in early May swelled the Ganges, tossing corpses up to the river’s surface and onto its shores. They washed dirt from the banks, exposing the bodies buried there.