40 bodies wash ashore on India’s Ganges River

Bodies believed to be former COVID patients have washed up in India as the nation’s second wave reaches horrific new stage.

The bodies of up to 40 people have washed ashore on the Ganges River in India.

Officials revealed the gruesome find on the border between the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Indian news network NDTV reported a number of the deceased appeared to have suffered burns upon being retrieved from the banks, likely as a result of mass cremations of deceased COVID patients across the nation in crisis.

“There is a possibility that these bodies have come out of Uttar Pradesh,” local official Ashok Kumar told the BBC.

According to local reports, private hospitals are now charging citizens huge fees to remove corpses from ambulances. Residents say the dire situation means some are left with no option but to discard their deceased family members in the river.

“Private hospitals are looting people. Common people are not left with money to pay a priest and spend more on cremation at the river bank,” local Chandra Mohan said. “They are asking 2,000 rupees (A$34.60) just to get the corpse out of the ambulance. The river has become their last recourse so people are immersing corpses in the river.”

Relatives sit next to the body of a family member for a funeral pyre to become available at a mass crematorium site on the banks of the Ganges river. Reports claim up to 40 bodies, some with burn marks, washed ashore this week.

At the time of writing, India has recorded more than 22.6 million COVID-19 cases and 246,116 deaths since the start of the pandemic. The current wave, which now has the subcontinent registering half of the world’s daily cases for over a week, has brought the government to its knees as the world searches for solutions.

The WHO has declared India’s second wave a crisis, sending in thousands of extra workers to assist their healthcare system, which has battled with oxygen shortages and overflowing ICUs for weeks on end.

Perhaps even more worrying, officials are now warning a third wave is “inevitable”. On Wednesday last week, India’s principal scientific advisor K. Vijay Raghavan said the country of 1.3 billion had to be ready for another wave of infections after the current one.

“Phase 3 is inevitable given the high levels of circulating virus. But it is not clear on what timescale this phase 3 will occur. We should prepare for new waves,” Mr Raghavan told a news conference.

ALLAHABAD, INDIA - MAY 05: People watch unclaimed bodies burn on funeral pyres at a mass crematorium site on the banks of the Ganges river.

The development on the Ganges came after scientists lashed the Indian government for “squandering” early successes in managing the COVID-19 outbreak, in a blistering editorial in a top medical journal.

An article in The Lancet said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempt “to stifle criticism” as the crisis escalates was “inexcusable”.

It came as the top US infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci said that India has “got to shut down” to take control of the devastating outbreak.

“You’ve got to shut down. I believe several of the Indian states have already done that, but you need to break the chain of transmission, and one of the ways to do that is to shut down,” the White House coronavirus adviser told the US ABC’s This Week on Sunday.

“The scenes of suffering in India are hard to comprehend,” reads the The Lancet article published on Saturday, which noted that health workers were exhausted and falling sick while social media is full of desperate doctors and relatives seeking lifesaving supplies.

“Yet before the second wave of cases of COVID-19 began to mount in early March, Indian Minister of Health Harsh Vardhan declared that India was in the ‘endgame’ of the epidemic,” the article reads.

-- with Emma Reynolds