Corona patients down 21 private hospitals declared green naidunia.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from naidunia.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
It had been raining heavily in Unnao, an impoverished district in the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh. The Ganga runs through it. The rain swelled the waters and turned the banks into slush. The river gave up the dead hundreds of putrefying corpses of Covid-19 patients, which had been buried in graves barely three-foot deep. Their families were too poor to afford wood for their cremation.
Before Covid-19 struck Unnao, wood for a pyre cost around Rs 500. It now sells for Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000. Add priests, attendants and samagri, the bill to reach paradise comes to around Rs 10,000. Even as thousands of compassionate citizens struggle to help coronavirus victims get food, oxygen, medicines and hospital beds, a malevolent beast has risen to profit from horror. He blackmails families begging for oxygen by charging them astronomical prices. He sells empty cylinders and faulty oximeters.
Chandigarh coronavirus Update 8 covid patients die and 650 new cases reported jagran.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jagran.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Pandemic profiteering adds to stress of COVID-19 patients
Private hospitals demand huge sums upfront for admission; ambulances make a killing and so do oxygen cylinder providers; pulse oximeters cost a bomb
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People waiting in a long queue to get Remdesivir at Kilpauk Medical College Hospital in Chennai. (Photo| Ashwin Prasath, EPS) By Express News Service
It is not just that the totally inept national healthcare management has made the second wave of Covid-19 more lethal than it ought to have been. It’s that pandemic profiteering by vultures in the system has amplified patient distress and even led to loss of lives. From oximeters to oxygen to ambulances to hospital beds and life saving medicines, the prices of all of them have jumped manifold. Even in states that imposed a price cap on those services, there is hardly any regulatory system to curb fleecing.