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On a sweltering April night in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the Indian state of Gujarat, Shayar Rawal rode his motorbike to a COVID-designated government hospital at 11:55 p.m. Over the next 24 hours, he had just one task: to count the number of dead bodies being brought to the mortuary.
Rawal—a reporter at the Gujarati daily newspaper Divya Bhaskar—counted four deaths in the first hour. Grieving relatives collected five more dead bodies in the next hour. When the number reached 100, he says, reality sunk in.
“I knew the government was hiding numbers, but this was way more than what I had expected,” Rawal says.
Officially, the city recorded just 15 COVID-19 deaths that day. But by the end of his vigil,
