Healthcare Strained As Coronavirus Swamps India

The coronavirus threatens to overwhelm India’s medical system as dozens of health workers test positive for the virus every day and doctors walk off the job because of a lack of masks, gloves and other protective gear

- Vidya Krishnan and Shashank Bengali

As cases of the coronavirus were rising steadily in India, 76-year-old Ravindra Nath Singh arrived at a private hospital in the northern city of Lucknow complaining of breathing trouble.

Already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Singh was immediately admitted to intensive care on March 20 and diagnosed with pneumonia. Doctors did not test him for the coronavirus because he had no travel history, but said he would need to remain hospitalised for at least a week, said his son, Jayant Singh.

But four days later, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown “to save India” from the coronavirus, and called on medical practitioners to halt nonessential surgeries in order to preserve hospital beds for the expected influx of COVID-19 patients. The next morning, Jayant Singh was stunned when doctors told him his father — who was still in the ICU, hooked up to a catheter and feeding tube — was well enough to be discharged and could be cared for at home.

“Everything changed after the lockdown speech,” said Singh, 42, a data scientist who works with the pharmaceutical industry. In the United States, doctors have begun to prepare for life-and-death decisions over how to allocate hospital beds, ventilators, and other equipment amid a surge in COVID-19 cases. In India — a country of 1.3 billion people that spends only a fraction of what other major economies do on doctors and healthcare — the rationing of medical care has already begun.

Patients suffering from chronic diseases such as HIV and cancer, and older Indians like Ravindra Nath Singh, are particularly vulnerable as the country deals with a cascading outbreak of the coronavirus, which by Monday had infected more than 4,300 Indians — a fourfold increase in a little more than a week.