Currently, social media posts in India are no longer about cheeky photos, funny memes or political jokes. In contrast, frantic calls to save lives flood Twitter and Instagram, as the latest wave of coronavirus cases and deaths overwhelms the country’s hospitals and crematoria.
In Bharath Pottekkat’s Instagram feed, a message shouts “Mumbai please help! Lungs damaged by pneumonia infection. He needs a bed for an ICU. “Another says,” Plasma is urgently needed for the treatment of Covid patients at Max Hospital, Delhi. “Follow more.” An urgent injection of Tocilizumab is needed. please, DM if you know the stocks in Bombay and the surrounding area ”.
New attractions come with every soda. “My brain can’t stand the overload of social media,” said Pottekkat, a 20-year-old Delhi law student. “I can’t process what I read. I feel asleep. “
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Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram are flooded with messages from bewildered family and friends asking from hospital beds to medications, CT scans, Covid tests on the door and even food for the elderly in quarantine .
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 fastest number of Covid-19 cases. growth of the world. The messages also reveal the panic and clutter between drug shortages, intensive care beds and medical oxygen.
A Covid-19 patient is being transferred on April 18 to a treatment center at a Calcutta hospital on April 18. Hospital beds are impossible to find and patients are being kept away. Several people have died at the hospital door when relatives ask for a bed.
Photographer: Debarchan Chatterjee / NurPhoto / Getty Images
People lined up at an oxygen tank refueling station in the city of Allhabad on April 20th. Media reported that at least 22 ventilated Covid-19 patients in a district in northeastern Bombay died Wednesday, suffocated by a rugged oxygen tank leak.
Photographer: Sanjay Kanojia / AFP / Getty
Relatives attend the cremation of a Covid-19 death at Nigambodh Ghat Crematorium in New Delhi on April 17. The crematoria are in operation all day and raise questions about the actual Covid-19 death toll in India.
Photographer: Sanjeev Verma / Hindustan Times / Getty Images
Highlighting the dire situation, India on Thursday recorded a record 2,104 new deaths from Covid-19, and 314,835 new cases unprecedented, the highest daily count in the world. The South Asian country is only second in the United States in terms of total infections after beating Brazil. The increase has forced India’s financial and political capitals (Bombay and New Delhi) to impose restrictions on the movement, with the latter imposing a strict six-day closure from 20 April. The Bombay-based state of Maharashtra is tightening its boundaries as of Thursday.
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A particular Instagram post sounded Pottekkat. A woman in her mother’s bed described an apocalyptic scene at a hospital in the northern city of Lucknow, where people faced a fight to get their hands on a new batch of oxygen cylinders that had just been to arrive. Separately, a hospital chain in New Delhi he approached a court to help secure critical gas.
Journalist Barkha Dutt noted the shortage of crematoria across the country and tweeted images of an incineration site in Surat, a city in the western state of Gujarat.
Nowhere is despair more evident than on the social media channel 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 , with the support of Temasek. Pvt. Pai is inundated with DM from hundreds of people, mostly strangers, who ask him for beds for ICU, oxygen supply and Covid drugs. The 7,000 beds in its chain of 27 hospitals are full.
“They caught us off guard,” Pai said. “No country is equipped to deal with such a rapid and serious increase.”
Migrant workers head home after a closure order in India’s capital on April 19, last year’s heartbreaking scenes are repeated as thousands of workers, unemployed and without income, they go home.
Photographer: Amarjeet Kumar Singh / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images
Ambulances parked in front of a morgue in New Delhi are expected to move the bodies of the deadly victims of Covid-19 on April 21st. India had been praised for keeping deaths low, but as the country crossed 300,000 new infections daily, deaths are steadily rising.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee / Bloomberg
In February, only 4% of Manipal beds were taken by coronavirus patients. A few weeks later, this number has risen to 65%, the rest is already occupied by patients with cardiac, oncological and other emergencies. Pai’s hospitals, doctors and administrators are stretched to the limit, he said.
Shares in India and the rupee have been a worrying success for the latest rise and the slowdown will affect the $ 2.9 trillion economy that had just recovered from a rare recession last year. The benchmark S&P BSE Sensex is down almost 9% from its February 15 record, while the rupee is approaching an all-time low.
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The collapse of the country’s decrepit public health system is manifested in the gruesome photos on social media of several Covid patients sharing a single hospital bed, a line of ambulances outside a hospital. Bombay and people dying while waiting for oxygen. Government helplines are broken. Thousands of social networks are advocating for the antiviral drug Remdesivir and many more are looking for donor plasma.
Health workers at a makeshift quarantine center set up in a banquet hall in New Delhi on April 21, India’s sadly inadequate hospital infrastructure is collapsing with new daily cases exceeding 300,000 this year. week.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee / Bloomberg
The Covishield vaccine is out of print at a Mumbai vaccination center on April 20th. 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 has 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 Calcutta on April 19th. India had administered about 127 million doses on April 20, but at a rate of 2.61 million doses a day, it could take two years to vaccinate 75% of the population with dose shots.
Photographer: Photographer: Dibyangshu Sarkar / AFP / Getty Images
However, there is a bright aspect in this chaos. Student respondents to technology professionals, non-profit organizations and even Bollywood actors like Sonu Sood are coming together to provide meals, distribute information on the availability of hospital beds or Remdesivir. They have amplified the voices of those in need of emergency help. Total unknowns are offered volunteers to bring supplies and food to patients’ doors.
Those who gather authentic and crowded information on social media are the current heroes of the current situation, said Vikas Chawla, co-founder of the Chennai-based digital agency, Social Beat.
“You just need some people to take a step forward and make it a reality,” Chawla said.
(Update the last case and death account in the sixth paragraph. An earlier version corrected the name of an actor in paragraph 14.)