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India has reported that more than one million showed coronavirus infections, a number surpassed by the United States and Brazil alone. But experts say cases and deaths in the country are likely to be underestimated due to gaps in evidence and reporting. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on the stage in India’s capital, Delhi, as a component of his Agents for Change series.
Judy Woodfruff:
India has reported more than one million cases of COVID, a number surpassed in the United States and Brazil.
Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on him in Delhi. This is a component of your Agents for Change series.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
These women are Indian squads in the fight against the coronavirus, their work, locate and those with symptoms.
They are called accredited social fitness activists or ASHA workers. In remote villages, in overcrowded slums across India, more than a million women like Bhagwan Devi and Kundan Devi walk every day.
Even the pandemic, it’s most common for pregnant women or young people to keep up with their vaccines.
Devi Bhagwan:
Put on your mask.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
Now they also have one more mission.
Kundan Devi (via translator):
We want to control patients. We bring them oximeters, we do the readings.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
This, they add, with few recommendations or even apparatus of the authorities.
Kundan Devi (via translator):
Masks If there are masks available, we get them. Otherwise, we have to buy ours. And gloves, if we have gloves, we’re alone.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
Global fitness experts say ASHA staff is a key resource, but so far misused to involve the coronavirus in a country that is suffering to exit a three-month blockade. Traffic is slowly returning to the streets of Delhi and the department stores have begun to open.
Crowds are much smaller than pre-COVID periods in food markets. Here, social estrangement is simply not an option. Like much of urban India, this city is preparing.
Hospitals in India have been inundated with cases of COVID. In Delhi, a 500-bed transient overflow facility, with limited medical equipment, was installed for others with COVID symptoms. There is also a new 10,000-bed quarantine center, the largest in the world.
Many of the city’s 20 million citizens in crowded spaces of single rooms.
Manish Sisodia:
Thirty percent of other people don’t have a spare room if they have a COVID in their home.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
I arrived in Manish Sisodia, The Deputy Minister Leader of Delhi.
Manish Sisodia:
For others who feel some discomfort, even if they are in an asymptomatic state, they may be taken to those centers.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
As Delhi prepares for an increase in the number of COVID cases, there is little evidence of an increase in economic activity several weeks after the closure ends.
Male (via a translator):
Sir, there’s no work. There’s no work.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
Everywhere in the city, every morning, investors expect paint breaks, or exchanges, for employers or their agents to submit job offers, regularly under construction.
Like most in the Indian economy, they are occasional or unpaid during the day. So no job, no pay.
Male (via a translator):
I have three daughters. Our circle of relatives is in a terrible situation. We got food here and there. And I’m not alone. All the deficient are in this situation.
Raj Panjabi:
The poor suffer the maximum because they have the least means to access essential facilities during these periods.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
Raj Panjabi is a Harvard physician who also runs Last Mile Health, an organization that serves hard-to-reach spaces in emerging countries. Panjabi says the government has ended the blockade to alleviate excessive economic hardship, however, it still does not control enough other people to detect COVID and, more importantly, does not allow contacts of those who test positive to be tracked.
Raj Panjabi:
Then, essentially, a user infects 3 people. And if this situation is repeated 10 times, the first case will have resulted in more than 59,000 cases.
But if one of those first patients were to isolate themselves, it would particularly interrupt the rate of transmission.
Manish Sisodia:
Frankly, it’s complicated to manage because, in India, systems are not online.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
In addition to not being online, he admits that Delhi has had a complicated start. The effects of the test took two to three days, allowing the infections to spread. The ability to test is still in distant cities like New York, but has quadrupled from the start, with a fleet of cell phones testing another 25,000 people a day and with faster effects.
Manish Sisodia:
Now you can get it in up to an hour. So help.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
The Indian government is also promoting an app that informs smartphone owners of all active COVID instances nearby. The government says it’s had a hundred million downloads.
The challenge is that not everyone has a smartphone, which adds many ASHA workers. They are officially classified as volunteers, so they get no profit and a monthly allowance as low as 1,000 rupees, or $13.
Bhadwan Devi (via translator):
I don’t have a salary. I can buy gloves or pay rent or feed myself. What do I intend to do? We’re afraid, because if they’re positive, we’ll have to touch their bodies. We can only hope we don’t get sick.
Kundan Devi (via translator):
For all the additional paintings with coronavirus, we get nothing. The 1000 rupees we received, will they even be bought if I get sick?
Raj Panjabi:
We’ve overlooked frontline and network fitness workers. And we have overlooked women in the labour market, especially poor women.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
Dr. Panjabi says ASHA workers can be a great asset, as they are preferably located to look for contacts.
But the truth on the ground is so simple. ASHA staff were attacked or, more commonly, simply ignored.
Kundan Devi (via translator):
Just yesterday, I said, stay away from the door. Go as fast as you can.
I said, I’ll stay on the road. Just give me your call and phone number and tell me if that user came or not. That’s all you have to tell me.
They say anything.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
Experts say there is an urgent need for public education. Misinformation about coronavirus and how it spreads abounds, leading to social stigma or, as we discovered on the paint site, to more urgent concerns.
Male (via a translator):
What do I do about the coronavirus? I don’t have anything to eat.
Fred via Sam Lazaro:
“I’ll starve before I get a coronavirus,” he says.
For the “PBS NewsHour”, with Rakesh Nagar in Delhi, here’s Fred through Sam Lazaro in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Fred de Sam Lazaro is director of the Under-Told Stories project at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, a program that combines journalism and teaching. He has worked at PBS NewsHour since 1985 and is a regular contributor and exchange presenter for PBS Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.
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