India – Priyanka Jhala lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her husband, daughter and two dogs. She moved to the United States from India in 2013, but her mother, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles still live in Kolkata and New Delhi.
Like so many of the more than 4 million people of Indian ancestry who now make the United States home, Jhala is watching the coronavirus ravage her native country India with horror, helplessness and anger.
“My friends in India tell me walking out of your house feels like walking into a death trap,” she told VOA. “A family member told me you don’t know if the person you’re talking to on the phone today will be OK tomorrow. Everyone sounds so down, defeated and scared.”
Jhala said she’s haunted by accounts of parking lots and parks turned into makeshift crematoriums, and people cutting down trees for wood to burn dead bodies.
Her brother, cousin and in-laws all got COVID-19 but were fortunate to recover without needing a hospital bed.
“But, of course, there wouldn’t have been hospital beds if they needed them,” she said. “So what then?”
India is the new center of the COVID-19 pandemic. On Friday, the country reported more than 414,000 new cases — a global record for the number of infections in a single country in one day. The country’s daily death toll also spiked to more than 3,900 on Wednesday and Thursday, up from just more than 600 a month earlier, according to Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
“It’s terrifying,” Jhala said. “I talk to my family every day, and it feels like there’s nothing I can do.”
It’s been an unprecedented and terrifying month for Indians. In late January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi boasted to a virtual gathering of global leaders that his country had “saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.”
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In late March and all of April, however, cases skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. A significant proportion of the more than 21.4 million COVID cases recorded in India have come during the past month. Spiking death rates soon followed.
“All of my loved ones are in India,” said Ketaki Mukhopadhyay, who moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, last year to attend medical school. “They’re there and I’m here, and I’ve got a lot of survivor’s guilt about it right now.”
Mukhopadhyay said many of her friends have lost parents and grandparents to the virus, and she’s worried she may, too, if things don’t get better soon.
Source – https://www.voanews.com/
