These days, social media posts in India are no longer about brutal photos, funny memes or political jokes. Instead, Twitter and Instagram are flooding furious calls to save lives as the latest spate of coronavirus cases and deaths overwhelms the country’s hospitals and crematoria.
On Bharath Pottekkat’s Instagram feed, one message shouted “Mumbai please help! Lungs damaged due to pneumonia. Need your ICU bed. Another reads: “Plasma is urgently needed for treatment of Covid patient in Max Hospital, Delhi.” More to come. ‘Tosilizumab injection is urgently needed. Please take note if you know of stock in and around Mumbai. ”
New appeal lands with every refreshment. “My brain can’t handle the overload on social media,” said Pottekkat, a 20-year-old law student in Delhi. “I can not process what I read. I feel numb. ”
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Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram are flooded with messages from upset family members and friends begging for everything from hospital beds to medicine, CT scans, Covid tests at the door, and even quarantined food for the elderly.
The desperate pleas, in the hope that someone will respond with a quick fix, offer a glimpse into the unfolding tragedy that befell a country of 1.3 billion people that now has the world’s fastest growing Covid-19 case study . The messages also reveal the panic and disorder amid drug shortages, intensive care beds and medical oxygen.
A Covid-19 patient is being taken to a treatment facility in a Kolkata hospital on April 18. Hospital beds are impossible to find and patients are turned away. Several people died before the hospital’s threshold when family members pleaded for a bed.
Photographer: Debarchan Chatterjee / NurPhoto / Getty Images
People are standing in a refueling station in an oxygen tank in Allahabad city on April 20. Media reported that at least 22 Covid-19 patients were killed in the ventilator support in a district north-east of Mumbai on Wednesday, suffocated by an accidental oxygen tanker.
Photographer: Sanjay Kanojia / AFP / Getty
Family members attend the cremation of a Covid-19 deaths at the Nigambodh Ghat Crematorium in New Delhi on April 17. Crematoriums are in operation 24 hours a day and this raises questions about the actual score of India in Covid-19.
Photographer: Sanjeev Verma / Hindustan Times / Getty Images
Highlights the gloomy situation, India on Thursday reported a record 2,104 new deaths in Covid-19 and an unprecedented 314,835 new cases – the world’s highest daily score. The South Asian country is second in the US in terms of total infections after beating Brazil. The boom has forced the financial and political capitals of India – Mumbai and New Delhi – to impose restrictions on the movement, with the latter forcing a strict six-day closure from 20 April.
Read more: Modi under fire for campaign as India washes through virus deaths
One particular Instagram post crackled Pottekkat. A woman at her mother’s bed describes an apocalyptic scene in a hospital north of Lucknow, where people end up in a quarrel to lay their hands on a fresh quantity of oxygen cylinders. Separately a hospital chain in New Delhi approached a court to secure the critical gas.
Barkha Dutt, a journalist, pointed out the shortage of crematoria across the country and tweeted photos of a cremation field in Surat, a city in the western state of Gujarat.
The desperation is nowhere clearer than in the social media feed of Ranjan Pai, the billionaire owner and co-founder of Manipal Education & Medical Group, which runs the country’s second largest hospital chain – the TPG and Temasek-backed Manipal Health Enterprises. Pvt. Pai is inundated with DMs from hundreds of people, mostly strangers, asking him for ICU beds, oxygen supply and Covid drugs. The 7,000 beds in its chain of 27 hospitals are full.
“We were caught off guard,” Pai said. “No country is equipped to handle a boom so quickly and so badly.”
Migrant workers are on their way home on April 19 following an exclusion order in the Indian capital. Last year’s intricate scenes repeated as thousands of laborers, without work and an income, trumped home.
Photographer: Amarjeet Kumar Singh / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images
Ambulances parked outside a morgue in New Delhi are waiting to transport the bodies of Covid-19 deaths on April 21. India has been praised for keeping deaths low, but as the country has crossed 300,000 new daily infections, the death toll is gradually increasing.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee / Bloomberg
In February, only 4% of Manipal’s beds were taken up by coronavirus patients. A few weeks later, the number climbed to 65%, while the rest were already occupied by heart cancer, oncology and other patients. Pai’s hospitals, doctors and administrators were stretched to the limit, he said.
Shares in India and the rupee have been hit hard by the latest upswing and curbs will boost the $ 2.9 billion economy that recently recovered from a rare recession. The benchmark for S&P BSE Sensex is almost 9% lower than its February 15 record, while the rupee is approaching an all-time low.
Read Andy Mukherjee’s column: How a Covid Spike Sucked the Oxygen from India
The collapse of the country’s dilapidated public health system is evident from the gut-wrenching social media photos of several Covid patients sharing a single hospital bed, a row of ambulances outside a hospital in Mumbai, and people dying while waiting for oxygen. . Government guidelines were broken. Thousands of social media outlets are advocating for the antiviral drug Remdesivir, and many more are looking for donor plasma.
Health workers at an improvised quarantine center set up in a banquet hall in New Delhi on April 21 are plunging into India’s unfortunately inadequate hospital infrastructure in thousands of new cases, which this week are more than 300,000.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee / Bloomberg
The Covishield vaccine is out of stock at a vaccination center in Mumbai on April 20. About half a dozen drug manufacturers have announced that they will produce hundreds of millions of doses of Russian Sputnik V vaccine after the government granted permission for emergency use.
Photographer: Indranil Mukherjee / AFP / Getty Images
On April 19, a health worker vaccinated a man with a dose of Covaxin vaccine at a municipal health clinic in Kolkata. India administered about 127 million doses on April 20, but at 2.61 million doses per day, it could take two years to vaccinate 75% of the population with two-dose jabs.
Photographer: Photographer: Dibyangshu Sarkar / AFP / Getty Images
However, there is a bright side to this chaos. Respondents of students to technology professionals, non-profit organizations and even Bollywood actors like Sonu Sood, gather to provide meals, disseminate information on availability of hospital beds or Remdesivir. They strengthened voices of those in need of first aid. Total strangers are volunteering to bring supplies and food to the doorstep of patients.
Those who gather authentic information on social media are today’s heroes in the current situation, said Vikas Chawla, co-founder of the social agency, Social Beat, in Chennai.
“It only takes a few people to step forward and make it happen,” Chawla said.
(Updates of the latest case and death in sixth paragraph. An earlier version corrected the name of an actor in the 14th paragraph.)