376 burials in 25 days: What explains the surging death rate in Ahmedabad’s burial grounds?

For the past two months, staff at Ahmedabad’s Ganj Shahid Kabrastan for Sunni Muslims have been shocked and overwhelmed by the near-constant stream of funerals at the burial ground every day.

There were as many as 199 burials at the large graveyard in April – a number three times higher than the 66 burials that took place in April 2019. The next month, the situation seemed to spin out of control: Ganj Shahid had 376 burials in just the first 25 days of May. In the same month last year, there had been just 61 burials.

Is the Covid-19 pandemic the reason behind this surge in deaths in Ahmedabad? The city is Gujarat’s biggest hotspot for the novel coronavirus, with 11,163 cases and 773 deaths reported so far, and a staggering mortality rate of 6.9%.

Rizwan Kadri, the head of Ahmedabad’s Sunni Waqf Board which manages the city’s burial grounds, points out that only 147 of the 575 burials at Ganj Shahid in April and May have been confirmed Covid-19 deaths.

“But we have been seeing a huge increase in the number of deaths at almost all of our kabrastans,” said Kadri.

Take Musa Suhag Kabrastan, for instance. It is Ahmedabad’s largest Sunni burial ground, where 71 people were buried...

Read more

from Scroll.in https://ift.tt/2MbZVb5