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India’s Epidemic of False COVID-19 Information

"Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi, the third major leader to downplay the covid threat.

See - Hindu Nationalists Are Pushing Magical Remedies for the Coronavirus

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As the virus has spread, the chief minister of the state where the Kumbh Mela was held said that “Maa Ganga’s blessings are there in the flow. So, there should be no corona.” A legislator in another state claimed that the purifying properties of cow urine and dung would combat the virus. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, said that a fit mind and yoga were effective preventative measures. Harsh Vardhan, India’s health minister, attended the product launch of “the first evidence-based medicine for COVID-19,” which, according to the event’s organizers, had been sanctioned by the World Health Organization. (The W.H.O. immediately denied the claim.) And, in one of his monthly addresses to the nation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi played images from a viral video, in which a doctor suggested that a nebulizer was a viable alternative to an oxygen machine. After an outcry from medical experts, the government removed the images from its coronavirus materials.

As confusion spread, desperate patients began taking drugs of any kind. “Indians are self-prescribing steroids,” Sakshi Pandit, a molecular biologist, told me. Some physicians have peddled false elixirs as well. “Doctors seem to be prescribing everything under the sun,” Pandit said. “My dad was given azithromycin ‘just to be on the safe side.’ And don’t even get me started on plasma transfusions. People are taking cancer drugs. They’re running around taking antivirals and antibiotics right now. What if they stop being effective? I don’t know what’s happening. Nobody is being held accountable.”

At first, as COVID-19 overwhelmed other nations, it seemed to miss India, giving rise to theories about the superior immunity of its citizens, the secret advantages of its climate, and the effectiveness of its leaders. In January, as daily cases remained low, Modi declared that India had “saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.” Soon after, election officials announced that state-assembly elections would take place in March and April, including eight phases of voting in West Bengal—with an estimated population of a hundred million. (A judge later assailed the move, telling election-commission officials that they “should be put up on murder charges.”) Campaigning in the state proceeded. In April, as the second wave .. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/first-vs-second-wave-of-covid-19-in-india-things-you-need-to-know/articleshow/82143427.cms .. grew, Modi held a rally for his supporters and told them, “Today, I see people in every direction. It’s the first time I’ve seen such a crowd. You have shown such strength that wherever I look I can see people. You have done something wonderful.”

In a matter of weeks, the coronavirus has torn through the country’s social safety net. It has seemingly spread everywhere, to every family; the wealthy flew abroad, the rest of us hunkered down in fear. Each of the fourteen people I interviewed for this article knew someone who had been infected. I asked one source when a particular acquaintance had died. He replied with one date, then corrected himself: “Wait, last Saturday was another friend. She died the previous week.”

Twitter became a stream of S.O.S.s. Someone’s wife’s father needed plasma, someone needed oxygen, someone else medicines, another an ambulance. Hospital administrators tweeted appeals for oxygen. On the morning of April 29th, administrators at a children’s hospital in Delhi posted that the facility had less than twenty minutes’ worth of liquid oxygen left. Help arrived. Three days later, officials at the same hospital tweeted that their supply was again nearly exhausted. Twelve hours later, they announced that the hospital would no longer accept patients who required oxygen, “due to inconsistent liquid oxygen supply.” On April 28th, seven patients died when hospitals in Uttar Pradesh ran out of oxygen. Three days later, twelve patients died when a hospital in New Delhi did as well. Dr. Prashant Mishra, a senior administrator at a hospital in Lucknow, told me that doctors were rationing oxygen. “Now everybody wants oxygen. I’m working in the capital of a state and here we have managed those things, but in the interior there would have been an issue, because no one was prepared for such a massive outbreak,” he said. “We’re trying to manage the maximum patients with the available resources.” He told me that, on average, he received forty to fifty calls a night from COVID-19 patients or their families.

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