Corpse Piles, Undocumented Cremations Reported Across India As COVID Rise Worsens

Deaths from India's latest coronavirus wave might be much higher than official reports say.

Families are scrambling to cremate dead relatives. The country's medical system is crumbing. The COVID rise has overwhelmed hospitals and morgues, leaving bodies stacked outside and with staff working through the night to process the dead.

Across India, reports are coming in of corpses wrapped in protective gear lined up outside crematoriums for hours while many eyewitness accounts suggest the real number of fatalities could be significantly higher than previously thought.

The country recorded 314,835 new infections late this week - setting a new world high for daily cases and bringing the national total to nearly 16 million since the virus first appeared last year.

Lucknow, capital city of India's most highly populated state Uttar Pradesh, reported just 145 COVID deaths between April 11 and 16 but the city's crematorium reported more than 430 COVID-related cremations over that same time, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

"Structures within the furnace, like the metal frames and the chimney, are melting and falling apart," one eyewitness, Kamlesh Sailor, said. "Repairing it and keeping it going is a challenge, but we have no other way, bodies will have to be disposed of as quickly as possible."

Outside of Lucknow, other cities are feeling similar pressure to dispose of bodies.

Sanjeev Gupta, a freelance photojournalist in the central India city of Bhopal, reported seeing 80 to 120 bodies being cremated every day last week at one crematorium for coronavirus-related deaths, despite official records showing less than 10 COVID-related fatalities per day.

Officials have come out against accusations of obscuring death records. "The figure of deaths is dynamic, difficult to reconcile from plain reading," Navneet Sehgal, chief secretary of the Uttar Pradesh government, said.

"No one is trying to hide COVID-19 deaths. Some of the deaths in Lucknow which are included as deaths because of COVID-19 are actually normal deaths which would have been counted wrongly," he said.

Even before the pandemic, medical experts estimate that only between 20-30% of all deaths in India are properly certified. The current medical crisis has only strained this dysfunctional system further.