MOCK TEST FOR FINAL EXAM 2
India is collapsing under a second wave of coronavirus.
Callousness and incompetence are killing us.
(The Washington Post – 23 April 2021)
The second wave of covid-19 is sweeping through India with the ferocity of an inferno;
misplaced triumphalism, complacency and willful incompetence have brought us to our
knees. And the official numbers — India just reported the world’s largest single-day
spike, with more than 300,000 coronavirus cases over the last 24 hours and more than
2,100 deaths — do not even begin to tell us the truth.
In Surat, Gujarat, a cremation site that had been closed for 15 years was reopened
because the city ran out of places to burn the dead. The undertakers at the grounds said
they are burning at least a 100 bodies a day. The official numbers for the entire state in
the same week placed the fatalities at 78. In Ghaziabad, an industrial town not even an
hour from New Delhi, I saw bodies wrapped in white sheets in the back of rickety old
cars. It can take an entire day before space opens up for a cremation. I counted 20 bodies
in a single hour, on a day when the official data placed the casualties at eight. We may
never know for sure how many lives are lost to the virus.
The disaster is the same in every city in India: inoculation centres are closing for days;
hospitals are turning away patients because they no longer have beds, oxygen is scarce,
medicine is not available at pharmacies, ventilators are nowhere to be found, and
patients run out of money trying to get treated. In this hour of national emergency, highflow
oxygen is the most critical shortage, since it is the only therapeutic treatment that
helps patients live. Its absence has led to hospitals to petition courts for intervention and
even beg for it online. “It’s gold dust,” a doctor told me wryly. Another doctor on the
front line shared horrifying instances of patients having to share one concentrator
between them as their oxygen levels plummeted.
Patients are asked to sign consent forms before admission to some hospitals, accepting
the risk that they may die from insufficient supply of oxygen. It is the 2021 version of
signing your own death warrant. Many of those dying during this second wave seem
much younger overall. At funeral sites, almost all the deaths I reported have been people
under the age of 50; some were in their late 20s.
Through this carnage, in a galling example of tone-deafness, election rallies —
mammoth gatherings in the hundreds of thousands — had not been canceled in the
eastern state of West Bengal until just a few days ago. Even then, they were just scaled
down and not scrapped. The Modi government has made many fatal errors. It had no
contingency in place for the pandemic’s second wave. The vaccine rollout was
inexplicably slow. Bureaucrats dragged their feet on clearances of foreign-made
vaccines, losing two critical months. So confident were they of having fought off the
first wave that vaccines were exported or gifted to smaller countries, making people,
including myself, feel a misplaced sense of pride when we could ill afford it. But
nothing was more galling than to see our politicians, including Prime Minister Narendra
Modi, continue to address political gatherings as people are dying and our hospitals are
collapsing. Modi’s decisions to call off the campaign should have come much earlier.
It all hit home for me this week, as I rode with my father, a diabetes patient in his 80s,
in an ambulance to the ICU. The severe crunch on the health system made my family
decide to use a private ambulance. When it arrived, it had a one-man crew, the driver.
There was no paramedic. It turned out that the single oxygen cylinder in the ambulance
did not work. By the time we got to hospital, my father’s oxygen had fallen dangerously
low. It was my incredible privilege that allowed us to finally secure an ICU bed. Then
I thought of the countless families I have talked to in the past few weeks across India,
who never even had that fighting chance. In all our anger and grief, Indians deserve
answers. There must be accountability. How did we get to this point? Heads must roll.
As a doctor told me: “when someone dies because you could not provide him oxygen,
that is not a natural death; this is murder.”
(727 words)
Please read the article above and do the exercises that follow.
I. WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS
Explain the meaning of each underlined word or expression as used in the article
1. Misplaced triumphalism
2. Gold dust
3. Tone-deafness
4. Bureaucrats dragged their feet on clearances of foreign-made vaccines
5. Heads must roll
II. WORD SEARCH
Find words or phrases which carry the following meaning in the article.
1. Large public political meeting (n)
2. In a mockingly or amusingly ironic way (adv)
3. To make a formal request (v)
4. Irritating (adj)
5. Vaccination (n)
III. COMPREHENSION WORK
Answer the following questions, using your OWN words.
1. How terrible is the current situation in India?
2. What is the common tragedy that cities across India are facing?
3. What is partly blamed for India's devastating Covid-19 crisis?
