Identifying close to 17 000 confirmed cases, the megalopolis of 18 million inhabitants, is the city of India hardest hit by the epidemic.
The morgues are full, bodies lying around in the rooms of hospitals, some patients need to share their bed, the caregivers are exhausted… The pandemic of sars coronavirus overwhelms the health system of Mumbai, the economic capital of India.
Identifying close to 17 000 confirmed cases of Covid-19, more than double the capital New Delhi, the megalopolis of 18 million inhabitants, is the city of India hardest hit by the epidemic. With 621 deaths to this day, she fears the worsening of an already critical situation.
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“The system is under enormous pressure, it is exploding,” says Deepak Baid, a physician, a critical care specialist who volunteered to lend a helping hand within the unit Covid of a public hospital.
A video macabre, widely shared on social networks and in the media in the indians, came to illustrate the magnitude of the crisis facing the “maximum city”, where coexist billionaires, stars of cricket and Bollywood, and residents of slums.
Filmed with a mobile phone in one of the major public hospitals in Bombay, we see the bodies of those dead of the Covid-19, packaged in black plastic bags, left in the middle of a room where you are treated other patients with the virus. The images have caused an uproar.
Anxious, tired, not paid
due to the lack of free space at the morgue of the hospital, the fear of families to recover the remains of their loved ones – or their inability to do so if these families are themselves placed in quarantine, disposal of corpses of victims of the new coronavirus is made difficult, explain the doctors. But dealing with patients is even more problematic.
The nursing staff of a large public hospital Lokmanya Tilak, better known under the name of Zion, being insufficient in number, Ravi had to change the diapers of his dying mother. “They gave us just the drugs and left,” says this 26 year old male who has asked to be identified by a pseudonym and describes hospital staff as “overwhelmed and tired”, sometimes with three patients per bed treated.
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Having since also contracted the virus, he now finds himself in a hospital, but only after being rejected by four other schools. “We don’t have the infrastructure to cope with this disease,” he says.
In march, the hospital of Sion, situated close to the large slum of Dharavi, had only one or two suspected cases per day. “Everything seemed under control. But then the situation has changed dramatically,” says Aditya Burje, internal within the institution.
At the end of the month of April, he and his colleagues groaned under the arrivals. “We saw 50 to 100 patients per day. 80% of them were positive, and many of them need to be placed on oxygen,” describes Aditya, who has not received his monthly salary since the containment national entered into force at the end of march in India. While many of his colleagues have been infected by the new coronavirus, the house admits to “being afraid” to go to work : “if something happens to me, who will take care of me?”
Deficiencies laid bare
protective equipment failing are that caregivers may be reluctant to undertake tasks that are sometimes as simple as changing the bed linen used by a patient of the coronavirus, says Nilima Vaidya-Bhamare, another doctor.
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Bombay currently has 4500 beds Covid and is working to extend this ability. A field hospital of 1000 beds is particular project in a commercial area, the intensive care units are installed in schools.
For Nilima Vaidya-Bhamare, the crisis of the sars coronavirus does that put light on the old problems of a public health system of india under-funded, ranging from a medical staff spilled over into the shortages of basic products like soap.
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“Covid-19”, the new coronavirus
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The indian government spends less than 2% of its GDP to health spending, a level well below that of other OECD countries. In 2017, India had only 0.7 physicians for every 1000 inhabitants, compared to 1.8 in China or 2.6 in the United States.
