After devastating India’s biggest cities, the latest COVID-19 wave is now ravaging rural areas across the world’s second-most populous country. And most villages have no way to fight the virus.
In Basi, about 90 minutes from the capital, New Delhi, about three-quarters of the village’s 5,400 people are sick and more than 30 have died in the past three weeks. It has no health-care facilities, no doctors and no oxygen canisters. And unlike India’s social-media literate urban population, residents can’t appeal on Twitter to an army of strangers willing to help.
"Most deaths in the village have been caused because there was no oxygen available,” said Sanjeev Kumar, the newly elected head of the farming community. "The sick are being rushed to the district headquarters and those extremely sick patients have to travel about four hours,” he said, adding that many don’t make it in time.
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