16-05-2021 The Asian Independent

10 16-05-2021 to 31-05-2021 ASIA
www.theasianindependent.co.uk
'Let them eat dark chocolate.' India's Covid-19 crisis is
devastating its most desperate people: The Economist
New Delhi : India's covid-19 crisis is
devastating its most desperate people,
The Economist said in a report.
The poor are losing jobs, going hungry
and falling victim to scams, it
added. "Pye dogs and circling scavengers
gave the first clue. When villagers
approached the riverbank, the
stench confirmed the horror. By the time
authorities collected and buried all the
bodies on May 11th, the count had risen
to 71. And this was at just one bend in
the sacred Ganges, by the village of
Chausa on the border between Bihar
and Uttar Pradesh, India's poorest, most
underdeveloped states. In the same
week at least three other grisly human
logjams were reported upstream," the
report said.
"These sad scenes reveal two things.
One is the scale of the tragedy now
sweeping India's vast interior. Far away
from city labs, no one gets tested, so no
cases are recorded, so no deaths are captured
in the national toll, which at
258,000 is a small fraction of the real
tally," The Economist reported.
The second thing the bodies in the
Ganges reveal is how India's second
wave is worsening the already harsh lot
of its poor.
"People borrow money to pay for
medicines, or for oxygen, or for an
ambulance driver who has charged them
extra Covid rates," Utpal Pathak, a local
journalist was quoted in the report.
"Then they can't afford the funeral." In
recent weeks, say residents of Chausa,
the cost of a cremation has tripled. It is
telling that the authorities, despite denying
that poverty has anything to do with
the scandal, have started supplying free
wood to the funeral ghats of Chausa.
Bihar has also capped the price of
ambulances.
After the first Covid-19 wave swept
India last year, numerous reports tried to
tally the cost to the poor. Pew, a research
institute, estimates that whereas just 4.3
per cent of Indians were earning less
than $2 a day in January 2020, a year
later, this had risen to 9.7 per cent, or
134m people.
An in-depth study by Azim Premji
University in Bangalore suggests that in
the wake of last year's nationwide lockdown,
some 230m Indians slipped
below a poverty threshold tied to the
national minimum wage (around $45 a
month). Its researchers found that, during
the lockdown, 90 per cent of the
poor consumed less food. Six months
later, their diets had not returned to normal.
Over the course of the year the
earnings of Indian workers, including
the lucky 10 per cent who hold salaried
jobs, declined by a third, The Economist
said.
Shocked by the pain it caused last
year, the central government has left
state and local governments to impose
their own lockdowns during this wave.
"But though the economy has not
come to a complete standstill, the sheer
scale of the outbreak means lots of families
have suffered just as much," the
report said. For many, the biggest blow
has been the loss of breadwinners.
Indian Railways, which employs 1.2m
people, says Covid has killed 1,952 of
its staff. The state of Uttar Pradesh in
April put 1.2m civil servants to work
running local elections and counting
ballots. The vote was a super-spreader
and an estimated 2,000 of these workers
subsequently died, including 800
schoolteachers, the report said. Each of
those deaths represented weeks of trauma
and expense for the families seeking
treatment and, for every person that
died, perhaps another 20 were seriously
ill, it added.
"And in an ordinary year, one in
every 20 families is pushed into poverty
by medical expenses. The past two
months have been anything but ordinary.
Millions of desperate Indian families
have been forced to sell gold, to
pawn possessions or to borrow at usurious
rates, all too often in order to pay
for unnecessary treatments prescribed
by harried doctors, or to provide basic
items lacking in government hospitals,
from oxygen tanks to syringes," the
report added.
The variety of traps they have fallen
into seems endless: medical staff
demanding bribes to secure hospital
admission, suppliers of fake medicines,
and even, in several states, conmen who
have painted over fire extinguishers to
sell as oxygen cylinders, it added.
Mostly, however, the government is
notable by its absence. Harsh Vardhan,
the health minister, who has promoted
herbal Covid "cures", last week advised
Indians to eat extra-dark chocolate with
"more than 70 per cent cocoa" in order
to beat Covid-related stress. Perhaps he
should read a recent World Bank report,
which shows that 86 per cent of Indian
families cannot afford a basic balanced
diet, let alone fancy chocolate, The
Economist said.
Covid outcomes may be more
severe in children : Study
New York : Children with Covid-
19 may not display typical symptoms
such as fever, cough and shortness of
breath, therefore more screening and
vigilance are required, researchers
warned.
The study led by researchers at
University of Alabama -
Birmingham, US, found that children
with Covid-19 may develop poor
clinical outcomes such as requiring
hospitalisation, critical care services
and mechanical ventilation.
For the study, the team identified
nearly 12,000 pediatric Covid-19
patients. The team found that the
most common symptoms included
cough and difficulty breathing, gastrointestinal
complaints such as nausea,
vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal
pain, and non-specific symptoms
such as fever, tiredness, muscle pain,
and disturbance of taste and smell.
"While the rates of poor clinical
outcomes are relatively lower in children
when compared to adults, 5-6
percent still required hospitalisation.
Among those hospitalised, 18 per
cent required critical care and 4 per
cent needed a ventilator for breathing,"
said Vibhu Parcha, a clinical
research fellow in the Division of
Cardiovascular Disease. The study
also showed racial disparities in
health care -- evident in the higher
risk of hospitalisation among children
from underserved minority populations.
The findings are published
in the Nature Scientific Reports journal.
The World Health Organisation,
in an October 2020 document, reported
that Covid-19 is much less frequent
in children than in adults.
Children and adolescents represented
about 8 per cent of reported cases
(and 29 per cent of the global population).
The study echoes the condition
of many children infected with
Covid-19 in the ongoing second and
lethal wave of Coronavirus in India.
Besides symptoms such as mild
fever, cough, cold and abdominal
issues, some even complained of
body pain, headache, diarrhoea and
vomiting. Children, even those below
1 year of age, were infected with the
virus.
Some kids are also reporting more
severe complications like multisystem
inflammatory syndrome (MIS-
C) -- a rare inflammatory condition
with persistent fever. It generally
occurs 2-4 weeks after the onset of
Covid. Health experts have urged
parents not to take their kids out and
expose them to the virus.
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