Today, social media posts in India are no longer about cheeky photos, funny memes or political jokes. Instead, Twitter and Instagram are inundated with frantic calls to save lives as the latest wave of coronavirus cases and deaths engulf the country’s hospitals and crematoriums.
On Bharath Pottekkat’s Instagram feed, one post screams, “Mumbai please help! Lungs damaged by pneumonia. I need an IC bed. Another reads, “Plasma urgently needed for treatment of Covid patient at Max Hospital, Delhi.” More to follow. “Urgently needed Tocilizumab Injection. Send DM if you know stocks in and around Mumbai.”
New calls come in with every refresh. “My brain can’t handle the social media overload,” said Pottekkat, a 20-year-old law student in Delhi. ‘I can’t digest what I’m reading. I feel numb. “
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Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram are all inundated with messages from distraught family members and friends begging for everything from hospital beds to drugs, CT scans, Covid door tests, and even quarantined food for the elderly.
The desperate pleas, hoping someone will respond with a quick remedy, provide a glimpse into the unfolding tragedy plaguing a nation of 1.3 billion people that now has the world’s fastest-growing Covid-19 caseload. The reports also reveal the panic and disorder amid shortages of drugs, intensive care beds and medical oxygen.
A Covid-19 patient will be taken to a treatment center at a hospital in Kolkata on April 18. Hospital beds are impossible to find and patients are sent away. Several people have died in front of the hospital when relatives begged for a bed.
Photographer: Debarchan Chatterjee / NurPhoto / Getty Images
People queue at an oxygen tank filling station in Allahabad city on April 20. Media reported that at least 22 Covid-19 patients on ventilator support in a district northeast of Mumbai died on Wednesday, suffocated by an accidental leak from the oxygen tank.
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 24 hours a day and raise questions about the actual number of Covid-19 deaths in India.
Photographer: Sanjeev Verma / Hindustan Times / Getty Images
Emphasize the grim situation, India on Thursday reported a record 2,104 new Covid-19 deaths and an unprecedented 314,835 new cases – the world’s highest daily count. The South Asian country is in second place after the US in terms of total infections, after surpassing Brazil. The wave has forced both the financial and political capitals of India – Mumbai and New Delhi – to impose movement restrictions, with the latter mandating a six-day strict lockdown starting April 20. The state of Maharashtra, home of Mumbai, is pulling the curbs from Thursday.
Read more: Modi is under fire for campaigns as India recovers from virus deaths
A certain Instagram post made Pottekkat rattle. A woman at her mother’s bedside described an apocalyptic scene in a hospital in the northern city of Lucknow, where people got into a scuffle to get a new batch of oxygen cylinders that had 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 across the country by tweeting photos of a cremation site in Surat, a city in the western state of Gujarat.
Nowhere is the despair more evident than in the social media feed of Ranjan Pai, the billionaire owner and co-founder of Manipal Education & Medical Group, which leads 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 IC beds, oxygen supplies, and Covid drugs. The 7,000 beds in its chain of 27 hospitals are full.
“We were taken by surprise,” Pai said. “No country is equipped to deal with a wave so quickly and so seriously.”
Migrant workers go home on April 19 following a lockdown order in the Indian capital. Last year’s heartbreaking scenes repeat as thousands of workers trudge home without work and income.
Photographer: Amarjeet Kumar Singh / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images
Ambulances parked in front of a morgue in New Delhi await the transfer of the bodies of Covid-19 fatalities on April 21. India has been lauded for keeping the death toll low, but as the country traversed 300,000 new daily infections, the number of fatalities is steadily increasing.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee / Bloomberg
In February, only 4% of Manipal’s beds were taken by coronavirus patients. A few weeks later, that number has risen to 65%, with the rest already occupied by heart, oncology and other patients. Pai’s hospitals, doctors and administrators are being stretched to the limit, he said.
Shares of India and the rupee have taken a hit over concerns that the latest surge and curbs will ruin the $ 2.9 trillion economy that just recovered from a rare recession last year. The benchmark S&P BSE Sensex is down nearly 9% from its February 15 record as the rupee is approaching an all-time low.
Read Andy Mukherjee’s column: How a Covid peak sucked the oxygen from India
The collapse of the country’s dilapidated public health system is evident in the heartbreaking social media photos of multiple Covid patients sharing a single hospital bed, a line of ambulances outside a Mumbai hospital, and people dying while waiting for oxygen. Government helplines have been broken. Thousands of social media forwards are advocating for the antiviral drug Remdesivir, and many more are seeking donor plasma.
Health workers at an improvised quarantine center set up in a banquet hall in New Delhi on April 21. India’s woefully inadequate hospital infrastructure is collapsing with more than 300,000 cases daily this week.
Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee / Bloomberg
The Covishield vaccine will be out of stock at a Mumbai vaccination center on April 20. About half a dozen drug manufacturers announced they will produce hundreds of millions of doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine after the government approves emergency use.
Photographer: Indranil Mukherjee / AFP / Getty Images
A health worker vaccinates 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 on April 20, but at the rate of 2.61 million doses per day, it could have taken two years to vaccinate 75% of the population with two-dose injections.
Photographer: Photographer: Dibyangshu Sarkar / AFP / Getty Images
However, this chaos has a positive side. Aid workers from college students to technology professionals, nonprofits and even Bollywood actors like Sonu Sood come together to deliver meals, distribute information about hospital bed availability or Remdesivir. They have amplified voices of people in need of emergency assistance. Total strangers volunteer to deliver supplies and food to the patients’ doors.
Those who collect crowd-sourced, authentic information on social media are today’s heroes in the current situation, said Vikas Chawla, co-founder of Chennai-based digital agency Social Beat.
“It only takes a few people to come up and make it happen,” Chawla said.
(Updates the last case and death count in the sixth paragraph. An earlier version corrected an actor’s name in the 14th paragraph.)