'Last week, Mahesh Degvekar, a 55-year-old school teacher had a vision. Gajanan Maharaj, a 19th century Hindu guru from neighbouring Maharashtra appeared in it, and shared an ayurvedic formula which ''cures'' COVID-19. On Friday afternoon, Degvekar''s story took a serious turn, or a bizarre one, whichever way one looks at it.
'India’s financial capital Mumbai is fine-tuning a plan to administer an unproven but much touted anti-malarial drug in neighborhoods including Asia’s most crowded slum, the first-of-its-kind mass experiment to ward off the coronavirus. The city officials are identifying a target group which will receive hydroxychloroquine, according to Suresh Kakani, additional commissioner at Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. Medical experts are being consulted on the duration of dosage, he said, adding that a decision was expected in a couple of days.
'A 66-year-old resident of Delisle Road tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday morning. She spent 30 hours in KEM’s parking lot waiting to be admitted before she was allotted a bed at St George’s Hospital late on Wednesday night... The husband of a pregnant Covid-19 positive woman, whose due date is April 17, struggled for 24 hours to get her admitted to a hospital. It required an MLA’s intervention to get her a bed at Nair Hospital...
'“My five-year-old daughter is running a high temperature,” says Shakieela Nizamuddin, “but the police stopped my husband [from taking her to the doctor]. He got scared and came back. We are not allowed to go outside our colony, not even to the hospital.” Shakieela, 30, lives in the Citizen Nagar relief colony in Ahmedabad city. She scrapes out a living from making kites at home. She and her husband, a daily wage worker, are seeing their hopes dwindle along with their income under the lockdown. “The clinic is closed,” she told me on a video call.
'The coronavirus patients and suspected cases at Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, where 1,200 beds have been set aside for COVID-19, have been segregated into wards depending on their faith. While Medical Superintendent Dr Gunvant H Rathod said a ward for Hindu patients and another for Muslim patients had been created as per a state government decision, Deputy Chief Minister and Health Minister Nitin Patel denied any knowledge of it...'
'SRINAGAR, Jammu and Kashmir—When Indian-administered Kashmir confirmed its first coronavirus case on March 18, Iqbal Saleem, a professor of surgery at Government Medical College in the capital, Srinagar, sensed the days ahead would be challenging. He sent a WhatsApp message to his friend, a surgeon in the United Kingdom, asking about the country’s response to the pandemic. His friend sent back a detailed protocol adopted by hospitals in Kent. For Saleem, just downloading the document was a herculean task.
'A few days before the nationwide lockdown was announced, 30-year-old Sanjeev Das was diagnosed with terminal stage cancer at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi. His old parents had suffered a lot — a piling debt, being abandoned by their other son, sleeping hungry for days together — just to see Sanjeev get better. They had one last dream. Whatever little time Sanjeev had left, they wanted to spend it together back at their home in Bihar's Banka district.
'It is 7AM in the morning. The roads are empty. Beside a clogged sewer, a man in his 50s holding a long rod changes to his uniform— a pair of torn shirt and trousers. Rajan*, a sanitation worker in the “Second Best” realty city of India, goes down the sewer everyday with nothing but a rod and a handkerchief on his face. The foul smell emerges from the deep sewer and soon his whole body is covered in black fluid which is the toilet waste of the nearby high class housing societies. He opens the lid of the manhole he is about to crawl into.
'A decision by the government of Madhya Pradesh to convert the state capital’s Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre into a COVID19-designated facility has had a devastating effect on one of India’s most vulnerable communities. The BMHRC is a 500-bed super-speciality hospital, which was set up to care exclusively for the first-, second- and third-generation survivors of a chemical disaster that is commonly known as the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984.
'A Dubai resident has blamed ‘coronavirus paranoia’ for his father’s death in Madhya Pradesh, India, last week. Moeen Ali, 39, said his father Sayyed Aashiq Ali, 65, was suffering from breathlessness caused by a heart ailment yet no private hospital in his hometown would admit him over coronavirus fears.
