Days After Celebration, Mom, Daughter, Baby Were Dead

Radha Gobindo Pramanik and his wife were supposed to be welcoming their long-awaited grandchild this month. Their daughter, Navanita, had been trying to get pregnant for nine years. Her overjoyed parents threw a party to celebrate the coming birth about two months ago, the AP reports. But Pramanik's wife had an on-and-off fever and a cough at the time, and within days of the celebration, she, her daughter, and her unborn grandchild were all dead, among the tens of thousands of victims of India's devastating COVID-19 surge.

The day after the party, Pramanik and his wife visited their daughter's home, where the two women stayed up talking through the night, planning for the baby's birth. Within a day, Pramanik's wife's fever returned and she became breathless. She was dead three days later. Navanita promised to take care of her father, but she was soon symptomatic, too, and within five days her body had been ravaged by the coronavirus. On April 18, as she was en route to a better-equipped medical facility, she and her unborn child died. "Sometimes I feel I have killed my wife and daughter," Pramanik says. "This thought keeps me awake the whole night." (The AP's full article has another devastating story out of India.)