India coronavirus: Why survivors of the brutal second wave are left with crippling debt

As Harishchandra Dhaware, a small town journalist from India’s heartland, was being wheeled into the intensive care unit in March this year, his wails filled the corridor — “Don’t take me to ICU, if I am to die, I want to die at home. How will you afford this? Don’t spend so much on me.”

“I can see the day in front of my eyes. He kept hitting himself in the face and wailing as they put him on a stretcher and took him away,” his wife Jayashri narrates one of the last memories she has of her husband to The Independent.

Dhaware, 48, died inside the ICU of a private hospital in Solapur, Maharashtra, on 6 April after a 15-day battle with Covid, followed by mucormycosis, or black fungus, that damaged his eyes and kidney and caused memory loss.