Active caseload thrice last year’s peak, a lone doctor struggles to cope with flood of patients in Saharanpur

Saturday, 8 May 2021Newsdesk

The patient is weak and gasping for breath, Dr V K Sharma can barely hear him speak. But he puts his hand on the patient’s chest, checks the makeshift saline drip on a rickety pole, and utters the same words of reassurance that he says he has most often used throughout his 45-year practice. “Bas sardi-khansi hai, thik ho jaoge (It’s just a cold and cough, you will be fine).”

New Delhi, 08 May 2021

But Dr Sharma knows it’s different this time.The words are more placebo than truth. “Should I tell them they could die?” he says.Over the past few weeks, Sharma’s one-room clinic on the roadside at Bargaon village in Saharanpur on Uttar Pradesh’s north-western tip has been handling a deluge of patients with Covid symptoms. As per news report of The Indian Express, it’s a snapshot of the grim challenge that India’s most populous state, which has the fourth highest active caseload in the country with 2.6 lakh cases, faces in the second wave that has engulfed big cities and is now battering rural districts such as Saharanpur.

Source -The Indian Express