These days, social media posts in India are no longer about naughty photos, funny memes or political jokes. Instead, frantic calls to save lives are flooding Twitter and Instagram as the latest wave of coronavirus cases and deaths overwhelm national hospitals and crematoria.
On Bharath Pottekkat’s Instagram feed, a message screams “Mumbai please help! Lungs damaged due to pneumonia infection. Needing an intensive care bed. Another says, “Plasma is urgently needed for the treatment of a patient with Covid at Max Hospital, Delhi.” More to come. “I urgently need an injection of Tocilizumab. Please DM if you know the stock in and around Mumbai. ”
New calls land on each refresh. “My brain can’t handle social media overload,” said Pottekkat, a 20-year-old Delhi law student. “I can’t process what I read. I feel numb. “
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Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram are all flooded with messages from disturbed family members and friends begging for everything from hospital beds to medications, CT scans, Covid tests on the doorstep and even food for quarantined seniors .
The desperate pleadings, hoping that someone will respond with a quick fix, provide a glimpse into the tragedy unfolding hitting a 1.3 billion-strong country that now has the fastest-growing number of Covid-19 cases in the world. The messages also reveal panic and disorder amid drug shortages, intensive care beds and medical oxygen.
A Covid-19 patient is being taken to a treatment unit at a hospital in Kolkata on April 18. Hospital beds are impossible to find and patients are returned. Several people died on the doorstep of the hospital while family members pleaded for a bed.
Photographer: Debarchan Chatterjee / NurPhoto / Getty Images
People line up at an oxygen tank refill station in Allahabad on April 20. Media reported that at least 22 Covid-19 patients receiving ventilator care in a northeastern district of Mumbai died on Wednesday, suffocated by an accidental leak in the oxygen tank.
Photographer: Sanjay Kanojia / AFP / Getty
Relatives are taking part in the cremation of a Covid-19 death at the Nigambodh Ghat crematorium in New Delhi on April 17. Crematoria are in operation non-stop, raising questions about the actual number of deaths in India Covid-19.
Photographer: Sanjeev Verma / Hindustan Times / Getty Images
Highlighting the gloomy situation, India on Thursday reported a record 2,104 new Covid-19 deaths and an unprecedented 314,835 new cases – the highest daily number in the world. The South Asian country is second only to the US in terms of total infections, after surpassing Brazil. The increase forced both India’s financial and political capitals – Mumbai and New Delhi – to impose traffic restrictions, the latter imposing a strict six-day closure on 20 April. The state of Maharashtra, which hosts Mumbai, has been tightening its borders since Thursday.
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A certain Instagram post shook Pottekkat. A woman at her mother’s bed described an apocalyptic scene at a hospital in the north of Lucknow, where people faced a fight to get their hands on a fresh batch of newly arrived oxygen cylinders. Separately, a chain of hospitals in New Delhi approached a court to help secure the critical gas.
Barkha Dutt, a journalist, pointed out the lack of crematoria across the country, posting on Twitter photos of an incineration plant in Surat, a city in the western state of Gujarat.
Nowhere is despair more evident than in the social flow of Ranjan Pai, the billionaire owner and co-founder of Manipal Education & Medical Group, which runs the country’s second-largest hospital chain – TPG and Manipal Health Enterprises, backed by Temasek. Pvt. Well, it’s full of DM from hundreds of people, mostly foreigners, asking for intensive care beds, oxygen supplies and Covid drugs. The 7,000 beds in its chain of 27 hospitals are full.
“We were caught unawares,” Pai said. “No country is equipped to cope with such rapid and severe growth.”
Migrant workers are heading home following a blockade in the Indian capital on April 19. Last year’s scenes of last year are repeated as thousands of workers, without work and without income, head home.
Photographer: Amarjeet Kumar Singh / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images
Ambulances parked in front of a morgue in New Delhi are waiting to transfer the bodies of the dead from Covid-19 on April 21. India has been praised for keeping deaths low, but as the country has gone through 300,000 new infections daily, deaths are on the rise.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee / Bloomberg
In February, only 4% of Manipal beds were taken by coronavirus patients. A few weeks later, this number rose to 65%, the rest being already occupied by cardiac emergency, oncology and other patients. Pai’s hospitals, doctors and administrators are stretched to the limit, he said.
Shares in India and the rupee have hit worries over recent growth, and the edges will hit a $ 2.9 trillion savings, which was just recovering from a rare recession last year. The benchmark S&P BSE Sensex fell nearly 9% from the February 15 record, while the rupee was approaching an all-time low.
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The collapse of the country’s decrepit public health system is evident in the broken photos on social media of several Covid patients sharing a single hospital bed, an ambulance line outside a hospital in Mumbai and people dying while waiting for oxygen. Government helplines are broken. Thousands of social media advocate for the antiviral drug Remdesivir and many others are looking for donor plasma.
Health workers in a makeshift quarantine center set up in a banquet hall in New Delhi on April 21. India’s unsuitable hospital infrastructure is collapsing with new daily cases exceeding 300,000 this week.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee / Bloomberg
The Covishield vaccine is depleted at a vaccination center in Mumbai on April 20. About half a dozen drug makers have announced they will produce hundreds of millions of doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine after the government approved emergency use.
Photographer: Indranil Mukherjee / AFP / Getty Images
A health worker inoculates a man with a dose of Covaxin vaccine at a municipal health clinic in Kolkata on April 19. India has administered about 127 million doses since April 20, but at a rate of 2.61 million doses per day, it could take two years to vaccinate 75% of the population with two doses.
Photographer: Photographer: Dibyangshu Sarkar / AFP / Getty Images
However, there is a bright side to this chaos. Respondents from students to technology professionals, non-profit organizations and even Bollywood actors, such as Sonu Sood, gather to provide meals, circulate information about the availability of hospital beds or Remdesivir. They have amplified the voices of those who need emergency help. Totally foreigners volunteer to bring supplies and food to patients’ doors.
Those who gather authentic information, coming from the crowd, on social networks are today’s heroes of the current situation, said Vikas Chawla, co-founder of the Chennai-based digital agency, Social Beat.
“It only takes a few people to take a step forward and achieve this,” Chawla said.
(Updates the last number of cases and deaths in the sixth paragraph. An earlier version corrected the name of an actor in paragraph 14.)