India was ravaged by a second wave of COVID-19 earlier this year. While the official death toll is 418,000, a recent report estimates that there might have been 4.9 million excess deaths. While deaths have disappeared from headlines, the true account of loss and trauma is yet to emerge. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government continued to downplay the extent of the damage, the ground reports told a story of death and devastation. Hospitals across the country struggled as they faced severe shortages of essential life-saving medicine and there were daily reports of people dying from a lack of oxygen. Social media timelines were filled with anguish and pleas for help. Crematoria worked around the clock, graveyards ran out of space, rivers swelled with bodies and embankments became shallow graves. The tragedy is that these deaths were foreseeable and preventable: the oxygen shortage, for example, was flagged by…

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