Her husband had brought home some other dead person’s body.

The woman had been admitted to the Government General Hospital in Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, southern India on May 13 after testing positive for Covid-19, and her husband Gaddaiah visited her every day.

However, when he arrived at the hospital on May 15, she was not there and he was led to believe that she had passed away.

He returned home with a body bag containing what he believed to be his wife’s remains.

Days after performing the last rites and having his wife cremated, his son Ramesh also died after contracting Covid-19 on May 23.

According to the Hindustan Times, a joint memorial service was held for the pair in their village on May 31.

Meanwhile, a recovered Girijamma, shocked that nobody had come to receive her from the hospital, made her way home on her own on June 2, to the shock of her family. Hospital staff had given her 3,000 rupees (RM180) to help her find her way home.

She was not immediately told that her son had died of Covid-19.

According to a relative, “inquiries later showed that in the hospital, Girijamma had been shifted to another ward for better treatment.”

“On May 15, when Gaddaiah went to see his wife, he could not find her in the original ward. As the duty staff could not give proper replies, he thought she had died.”

The staff then showed him the body of a 60-year-old woman at the morgue, who had not been identified.

“Maybe, because he was in grief, he could not properly identify the body and mistook the body as that of his wife. At his request, the staff handed over the body to Gaddaiah.”

The resident medical officer at the Vijayawada Government Hospital, A Hanumantha Rao, said bodies in the mortuary were only handed over to the relatives after proper identification.

“Similarly, the body of the woman was handed over to Gaddaiah only after he identified it. Girijamma was actually undergoing treatment in another ward, and she was discharged after she recovered.”