The injustice of it
Reporting from the heart of India’s Covid19 pandemic: For Kiwi reporter Elizabeth Puranam, who lives and works in New Delhi, the second wave of India’s Covid-19 crisis is hitting harder and closer to home.
Iwas on my way to report from a makeshift Covid-19 care centre that was being built in central New Delhi when I got the dreaded message from my fiance Alex. ‘‘Nisheeth’s father’s oxygen level is super low. 58. I’m trying to get our neighbour Anhsul’s contact for oxygen.’’ I was used to seeing messages on Twitter from people looking for hospital beds and oxygen for their sick relatives, but not from anyone I knew.
We knew our friend Nisheeth’s parents had Covid, but now things had really deteriorated. An oxygen level under 94 needs treatment fast; a saturation of less than 90 is a clinical emergency. We knew there were no hospital beds left in Delhi or the surrounding states. Nisheeth couldn’t get through to an ambulance service. We told him about NGOs administering oxygen for free, and found oxygen suppliers, but Nisheeth couldn’t find the life-saving gas for his father until that night.
We were sitting on our balcony early the next morning when he called us crying: ‘‘Alex, call an ambulance. Dad’s not breathing.’’ The ambulance came, but it was too late.
Nisheeth’s father died exactly six weeks after our friend Chetan’s father, also from Covid-19. Like Nisheeth, both of Chetan’s parents caught the virus. But unlike Nisheeth’s father, Chetan’s died in a hospital, after spending more than a week there, with all the medical care at the hospital’s disposal.
The situation deteriorated fast in India; the second wave of the virus has been described as a tsunami. Cases have gone up much faster than they did last year, overwhelming hospitals, which have to turn patients away.
When the virus first hit India last year, the world’s biggest lockdown laid bare the country’s inequalities. While those who had homes or could work from home did so, 100 million migrant workers who had lost their jobs returned to their home states.
Ten million people walked home, often hundreds of kilometres. Hundreds died on the journey. But the second wave of the virus has been the great equaliser. It doesn’t matter who you are or who you know. If you need a hospital bed or oxygen, you have to go from hospital to hospital, pleading for help.
Delhi – a city of 20 million people – has become a tragic tale of lines: long lines outside vaccination centres in the country that produces more vaccines than any other in the world, but doesn’t have enough Covid jabs for its own population.
There are long lines of desperate people outside oxygen suppliers, waiting to fill up cylinders for their sick relatives who are being cared for at home because hospitals are full. There are lines of ambulances outside hospitals, carrying patients struggling to breathe, as their family members plead with staff to admit them, but more often than not are turned away.
It is heartbreaking to watch so much desperation, to go home and wonder if the people you saw being turned away from hospitals managed to find a bed.
Some faces and cries stay with you longer than others. I heard Sehdev Bhatta’s cries before I saw him outside Delhi’s Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital. He walked up to the men in charge of security and told them that his wife was in an ambulance, struggling to breathe. Mohammed Haneef told him the same thing he told everyone else outside the hospital – there were no beds available.
Sehdev told us, crying desperately, that he left their 2-yearold son with an acquaintance, while he went from hospital to hospital to have his wife admitted. He didn’t know if his son had eaten in four days.
He was a broken man, almost as worried about his toddler as he was for his wife. He left when his ambulance driver told him his wife would die if they kept waiting there.
When I remember what I’ve seen, or hear myself saying, ‘‘Our friend’s father died. We couldn’t find him a hospital bed or oxygen until it was too late,’’ I can’t believe I’m uttering those words.
People are dying in India not just because of the coronavirus, but because of a poorly funded public healthcare system and a government which didn’t prepare for a second wave, despite ample warnings from its own committees and scientists. And that is the hardest part of it all to bear – the injustice of it.