Of the 50,000 samples taken from people in the city of Haridwar along the Ganges River, where the Kumbh Mela river bathing festival is taking place, 408 tested positive on March 12 and 594 tested positive on April 13, authorities said.
Hundreds of thousands of ash-smeared people and Hindus continued to jostle on April 14 to take a dip in the Ganges River even though India was recording a record increase in daily infections.
More than 1,000 people tested positive for nCoV during the Ganges River festival
Crowds jostle at the Ganges River bathing festival in Haridwar city, Uttarakhand state this week.
`We moved the team taking test samples to another place to avoid trampling on each other,` said SK Jha, Haridwar’s medical director.
According to police, 650,000 worshipers have bathed in the river since the morning of April 14 and in some areas, many people were fined for not practicing social distancing.
Jha said cases in the city have increased to more than 500 per day since the festival began.
`There will be super infections because there is no space to test hundreds of thousands of people in a cramped city, and the government also does not have enough facilities and human resources,` a senior Uttarakhand state official said.
Hindus believe that bathing in the Ganges River relieves people of their sins and that the Kumbh Mela festival brings salvation from the cycle of life and death.
`What you are seeing is not a Kumbh Mela but a corona atomic bomb,` Indian filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma posted on Twitter with a photo of a sea of devotees.
Hindu devotees take a dip in the Ganges River during the Kumbh Mela religious festival taking place in Haridwar city on April 12.
India recorded 184,372 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, double the number at the beginning of the month and bringing the total number of infections nationwide to more than 14 million.
Despite the rapid increase in infections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has refused to call off the month-long festival, possibly due to fears of a backlash from religious leaders in the predominantly Muslim country.
`Faith is the most important thing to us. Because of that strong belief, many people come here to soak in Ganga (the name of the Ganges River after the goddess in Hinduism)`, Siddharth Chakrapani, founder of
