Mumbai: Gas and firewood furnaces at a crematorium in Surat have been running so long without a break during the COVID-19 pandemic that metal parts have begun to melt. “We are working around the clock at 100 per cent capacity to cremate bodies on time,” Kamlesh Sailor was quoted as saying by ‘Reuters’. He is the president of the trust that runs the crematorium in the diamond-polishing city of Surat.
Hospitals are full and oxygen and medicines in short supply in an already creaky health system. It is being debated that several major cities are reporting far larger numbers of cremations and burials under coronavirus protocols than official COVID-19 death tolls. This is according to crematorium and cemetery workers, media and a review of government data.
India registered more than 2.59 lakh new infections, Tuesday and a record fatality of more than 1,700 persons.
Government officials said the mismatch in death tallies may be caused by several factors, including over-caution. A senior health official in Gujarat said the increase in numbers of cremations had been due to bodies being cremated using COVID protocols ‘even if there is 0.1% probability of the person being positive’.
“In many cases, patients come to hospital in an extremely critical condition and die before they are tested. There are instances where patients are brought dead to hospital. So we do not know if they are positive or not. Hence even for cremating them, COVID-19 protocols are being followed,” the official informed.
In Surat, the crematorium run by the trust and a second one known as Umra have cremated more than 100 bodies a day under COVID protocols over the last week. This is far in excess of the city’s official daily COVID-19 death toll of around 25.
Prashant Kabrawala, trustee of Narayan Trust, which manages a third crematorium called ‘Ashwinikumar’, declined to provide the number of bodies received under COVID protocols, but said cremations there had tripled in recent weeks.
“I have been regularly going to the crematorium since 1987, and been involved in its day-to-day functioning since 2005, but I haven’t seen so many dead bodies coming for cremation in all these years, even during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in 1994 and floods in 2006,” Kabrawala informed.
India is not the only country to have its coronavirus statistics questioned. But the testimony of workers and a growing body of academic literature suggest deaths in India are being underreported compared to other countries.
In Lucknow data from the largest COVID-only crematorium, ‘Baikunthdham’, shows double the number of bodies arriving on six different days in April than government data on COVID deaths for the entire city.
The figures do not take into account a second COVID-only crematorium in the city, or burials in the Muslim community that makes up a quarter of the Lucknow’s population.
Crematorium head Azad, who goes by only one name, said the number of cremations under COVID-19 protocols had risen five-fold in recent weeks.
“We are working day and night,” Azad said. “The incinerators are running full time but still many people have to wait with the bodies for the last rites,” he added.
‘India Today’ recently reported that in two crematoriums in Bhopal, 187 bodies were cremated following COVID protocols in four days in April. However, the official COVID death toll stood at five.
Last week ‘Sandesh’, a Gujarati newspaper, counted 63 bodies leaving a single COVID-only hospital for burial in the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad. However, on that particular day government data showed only 20 coronavirus deaths.