On Monday (May 10), Indian officials said dozens of dead bodies – washed ashore on the banks of the Ganges River in Northern India – are suspected to be Covid-19 victims.
The pandemic is spreading fast in India's remote areas where hospitals are few and far apart, exhausting local health and funerary services, AFP reported.
According to Ashok Kumar, a local official, around 40 corpses are found on said riverbanks, near the border between two of India's poorest states Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, in Buxar district.
Some media outlets have reported that the number of corpses may be as high as 100 – authorities have been directed to dispose of all the bodies either by burial or cremation.
BBC reported that locals believed the bodies were placed in the river because families did not have the money to buy wood for funeral pyres and that local cremation facilities were overloaded.
"It is really shocking for us," one resident said.
According to Reuters, India's has a total of 22.99 million coronavirus infections with close to 250,000 fatalities as of Tuesday (May 11).
Around 4000 people are dying every day from Covid-19, official statistics showed, but many experts believe the true tally could be several times more than that.
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