India’s Covid Tragedy as Seen on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
[ad_1]
These days, social media posts in India are no longer about cheeky 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 the nation’s hospitals and crematoriums.
On Bharath Pottekkat’s Instagram feed, one message screams “Mumbai please help! Lungs damaged due to pneumonia infection. In need of ICU bed.” Another reads “Plasma urgently required for treatment of Covid patient in Max Hospital, Delhi.” More follow. “Urgently needed Tocilizumab injection. Please DM if you know of stock in and around Mumbai.”
New appeals land with every refresh. “My brain can’t handle the social media overload,” said Pottekkat, a 20-year-old Delhi law student. “I can’t process what I’m reading. I feel numb.”
Read more: There’s a New Virus Variant in India. How Worried Should We Be?
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram are all inundated with messages from distraught family members and friends begging for everything from hospital beds to medicines, CT scans, doorstep Covid tests, and even food for the elderly in quarantine.
The desperate pleas, hoping someone will respond with a speedy remedy, offer a peek into the unfolding tragedy buffeting a country of 1.3 billion people that now has the world’s fastest-growing Covid-19 caseload. The messages also reveal the panic and disarray amid shortages of drugs, intensive-care beds and medical oxygen.
A Covid-19 patient is being taken to a treatment facility at a hospital in Kolkata, on April 18. Hospital beds are impossible to find and patients are being turned away. Several people have died at hospital doorstep as family members plead for a bed.
Photographer: Debarchan Chatterjee/NurPhoto/Getty Images
People line up at an oxygen-tank refilling station in Allahabad city, on April 20. Media reported that at least 22 Covid-19 patients on ventilator support in a district north east of Mumbai died Wednesday, choked off by an accidental oxygen tanker leak.
Photographer: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty
Relatives attend the cremation of a Covid-19 fatality at Nigambodh Ghat crematorium in New Delhi, on April 17. Crematoriums are in operation round the clock, raising questions about India’s actual Covid-19 death count.
Photographer: Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
Highlighting the grim situation, India on Thursday reported a record 2,104 new Covid-19 deaths, and an unprecedented 314,835 fresh cases — the world’s highest daily tally. The South Asian country is second only to the U.S. in terms of total infections after surpassing Brazil. The surge has forced both India’s financial and political capitals — Mumbai and New Delhi — to impose restrictions on movement, with the latter mandating a six-day strict lockdown starting April 20. Maharashtra state, home to Mumbai, is tightening curbs starting Thursday.
Read more: Modi Under Fire for Campaigning as India Reels From Virus Deaths
One particular Instagram post rattled Pottekkat. A woman at her mother’s bedside described an apocalyptic scene at a hospital in the northern city of Lucknow, where people got into a scuffle to lay their hands on a fresh batch of oxygen cylinders that just arrived. Separately, a hospital chain in New Delhi approached a court to help secure the critical gas.
Barkha Dutt, a journalist, pointed out the shortage of crematoriums around the country, tweeting pictures of a cremation ground in Surat, a city in the western state of Gujarat.
Nowhere is the desperation more evident 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 deluged with DMs from hundreds of people, mostly strangers, asking him for ICU beds, oxygen supply and Covid drugs. The 7,000 beds in his 27-hospital chain are full.
“We were caught off-guard,” Pai said. “No country is equipped to handle a surge this fast and this severe.”
Migrant workers make their way home following a lockdown order in the Indian capital, on April 19. Last year’s gut-wrenching scenes are repeating as thousands of laborers, without work and an income, trudge homeward.
Photographer: Amarjeet Kumar Singh/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Ambulances parked outside a morgue in New Delhi wait to transfer the bodies of Covid-19 fatalities, on April 21. India had been lauded for keeping deaths low but as the country crossed 300,000 new daily infections, fatalities are steadily rising.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg
In February, only 4% of Manipal’s beds were taken by coronavirus patients. A few weeks later, that number has climbed to 65%, the rest already occupied by emergency cardiac, oncology and other patients. Pai’s hospitals, doctors and administrators are stretched to the limit, he said.
India’s stocks and the rupee have taken a hit on concern the latest surge and curbs will pummel the $2.9 trillion economy that was just recovering from a rare recession last year. The benchmark S&P BSE Sensex is down almost 9% from its Feb. 15 record, while the rupee is approaching an all-time low.
Read Andy Mukherjee’s column: How a Covid Spike Sucked the Oxygen Out of India
The collapse of the country’s decrepit public health system is evident in the gut-wrenching photos on social media of multiple Covid patients sharing a single hospital bed, a line of ambulances outside a hospital in Mumbai, and people dying as they wait for oxygen. Government helplines are broken. Thousands of social media forwards plead for the antiviral drug Remdesivir, and many more seek donor plasma.
Health workers at a makeshift quarantine center set up in a banquet hall in New Delhi, on April 21. India’s woefully inadequate hospital infrastructure is collapsing with daily new cases exceeding 300,000 this week.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg
The Covishield vaccine is out of stock at a vaccination center in Mumbai, on April 20. About half a dozen drugmakers announced they’ll produce hundreds of millions of doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine after the government granted emergency use approval.
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 had administered about 127 million doses as of April 20, but at the rate of 2.61 million doses a day, it could take two years to vaccinate 75% of the population with two-dose jabs.
Photographer: Photographer: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
There’s however a bright side to this mayhem. Responders from students to technology professionals, non-profit organizations and even Bollywood actors like Sonu Sood are rallying to supply meals, circulate information on availability of hospital beds or Remdesivir. They’ve amplified voices of those in need of emergency help. Total strangers are volunteering to bring supplies and food to patients’ doorsteps.
Those who put together crowd-sourced, authentic information on social media are today’s heroes in the current situation, said Vikas Chawla, co-founder of Chennai-headquartered digital agency, Social Beat.
“It takes just a few people to step forward and make it happen,” Chawla said.
(Updates latest case and death tally in sixth paragraph. An earlier version corrected the name of an actor in 14th paragraph.)
[ad_2]
Source link
