Covid, non-Covid, no food, so many ways to mortality.

"India logged in a record 2,17,353 daily coronavirus cases as many states grappled with shortages of hospital beds, oxygen, medicines and vaccine doses," NDTV. "1,185 people dying of Covid in the last 24 hours pushed the country's death count to 1,74,308." Both figures are gross understatements. Partly it is because labs are running out of RT-PCR testing kits as demand suddenly exploded. More ominously, politicians and civil servants have ordered labs not to test to minimise the numbers of infections and deaths, Economic Times (ET). In Uttar Pradesh (UP), "Executives working at collection centres of prominent diagnostic chains Dr Lal Path-Labs and SRL Diagnostics said they have not been collecting samples for Covid-19 testing for close to 10 days now because they have orders from the administration to not test." "On Friday, additional chief secretary for information Navneet Sehgal said the chief minister has said that if private laboratories refuse to test despite having capacity, action will be taken against them." First order them not to test and then threaten them to hide your offence. "A day after a video showing mass funeral pyres at Lucknow (capital of UP) cremation ground -- Bhainsakund -- surfaced on social media platforms, the Lucknow Municipal authorities got the cremation ground fortified with tin sheets erected around the area to block the view of the cremation ground from the general public." The dead cannot bear witness, after all. "At a Surat crematorium on Wednesday night, five bodies were cremated on a single makeshift pyre built to speed up the disposal of a rush of corpses," Times of India (TOI). How they separated the ashes for the families is a mystery. In two government hospitals in Vadodara district about 350 people have died in a week but according to the government only 300 have died in the whole of the last one year. "In Bharuch, at least 260 Covid-19 victims have been consigned to the flames in the designated crematorium since April 7. The data was obtained from the crematorium register. However, the official death toll in Baruch district since the beginning of the pandemic last year is 35." Surat, Vadodara and Bharuch are in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state of Gujarat. "Last rites of 108 people who died of coronavirus in Bhopal were performed on Thursday, a figure vastly different from the Madhya Pradesh (MP) government's claims on Covid-19 fatalities that day, according to records maintained by crematoriums and graveyards in the state capital and officials working there. The government claimed that only 8 people had died of the infection in Bhopal district in the last 24 hours (Thursday)," India TV. UP, MP and Gujarat all have BJP governments. There are many ways to kill people other than due to Covid. The Delhi government ordered 14 private hospitals to treat only Covid patients but later allowed some of them to set aside 10-30% of beds for patients with other emergencies. Patients on dialysis for kidney failure, chemotherapy for cancer and other life saving therapies are being denied treatment because of a lack of beds. "After riding out a year of the pandemic, including a first wave, states and cities still have no real plan of action to deal with the second wave," wrote an editorial in ET. "The months of lockdown should have been used to put in place response systems. Yet, governments in major cities like Delhi and Mumbai are  still opting for expediency rather than efficacy." Why should they care when they have protected themselves from any demand for damages under the British Epidemic Disease Act of 1897?  But, we are not protected until we have a certificate with the Supreme Leader's picture on it. Those who are looking for beds are lucky. At least, they are not staring at starvation.