“Please send us oxygen”: Panic and distress messages in India due to the rise in coronavirus infections

Dr. Gautam Singh is concerned when the ventilator announces that oxygen levels are critically low, and is concerned to hear his critically ill patients begin to wheeze in the New Delhi emergency room. India, where he works.

Like other doctors in the India, which on Monday established another historical maximum of contagions of coronavirus For the fifth day in a row with more than 350,000, the cardiologist has had to beg and borrow tanks just to keep his most seriously ill patients alive for another day.

On Sunday night, when oxygen supplies from other nearby hospitals were also nearly empty, the desperate 43-year-old doctor took to social media by posting a video on Twitter: “Please send us oxygen”she says, her arms crossed and her voice cracking. “My patients are dying.”

Initially, the India was considered a success story in weathering the pandemic, but the COVID-19 it is now advancing rapidly among its 1.4 billion people, and health systems are beginning to collapse.

Distress messages like the one Singh sent reveal the level of panic in the country.

In addition to oxygen supplies being depleted, intensive care units are operating at full capacity and almost all artificial respirators are in use. As the death toll rises, the night skies in some cities glow with funeral pyres as crematoria are saturated and corpses are being cremated in the open.

On Monday, the country reported another 2,812 deaths, and about 117 people die from the disease every hour, but experts say even such numbers are likely to be lower than the actual numbers. The new infections brought the total in India to more than 17.3 million, behind only the United States.

Doctors like Singh are on the front lines, trying to get the supplies needed to keep their patients alive.

Singh received 20 oxygen tanks on Monday, just enough to keep the hospital going for a day until the ventilators start sending their warning beeps again.