There is nothing to do but look on helplessly as India gasps for breath.
On Friday, the country recorded 332,730 new infections. Four million people have been infected in April alone, and 24,452 have died. These official numbers are assumed to be a massive undercount. With the crisis in many states only just beginning, no one knows when the peak will come.
People are dying in parking lots of hospitals while their loved ones plead with medical staff to let them in. They are dying in the backseats of cars where they have been hooked up to oxygen tanks by their children who drive from hospital to hospital in search of a bed. They are dying inside ICUs when oxygen supplies run out. They are dying as they live tweet their drastically falling oxygen saturation levels because no doctor is available to take their calls. Alongside the older population, they are now dying in their 20s and 30s.
This week Indian Twitter has revealed the true meaning of the term “doom scrolling.” My newsfeed has been filled with desperate appeals for blood donations, plasma from recovered patients, ICU beds, ventilators, oxygen and even the drug Remdesivir, all of which are in woefully short supply. In the absence of assistance from the government, strangers are turning to one another on social media. The sense of panic and urgency is so palpable that even people in Pakistan, India’s greatest political enemy, have started a hashtag called #indianeedsoxygen to implore their prime minister to send help to their neighbor.
In this darkest of hours, those of us who are Indian immigrants living in the U.S. are wracked with worry for friends and families back home and feel guilt for the fact that here we at least are safe. As an Indian national who lives in Michigan, I watch from afar as the images pour in of an elderly woman sitting in the middle of the road hooked up to an oxygen cylinder, of people sleeping on sidewalks outside hospitals, of a stone-faced mother squatting next to her son’s dead body, of grown men sobbing as they beg strangers for help, of mass funeral pyres in crematoriums.
A couple of weeks ago, the city I was most worried about was Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, which was reporting more than half of the total number of infections in India.
This week, my friends in Delhi have stopped responding to my WhatsApp messages. A few nights ago, growing increasingly alarmed at the radio silence of a journalist friend, I finally called him. He answered the phone and managed somehow to say hi — from his hospital bed. The thought of calling others now fills me with dread.
In a few short weeks, India has gone from a mood of triumph over low COVID numbers to one of despair.
Whose fault is it exactly? Is it the people who celebrated too soon and decided to resume normal lives? Is it the national BJP government which, instead of preparing for this crisis, actively encouraged thousands of Hindu supporters to attend the Kumbh Mela earlier this month for a holy bath in the Ganges River? Is it the political parties that, until yesterday, continued brazenly with their massive election rallies? Is it the new double mutant variant B1617? Or is it the years and years of neglect of the public health infrastructure by successive governments that has today left millions of Indians without basic medical resources in their hour of greatest need?
For those who survive these weeks, there will be plenty of time in the years to come for recriminations and reflection, to talk about denial and selfishness and stupidity. Right now, they need whatever support the international community can give them. Individual donations are always valuable, but what India really needs is large scale interventions from foreign governments. It needs vaccines, oxygen and medical personnel.
And it needs something else.
I am an atheist. Nearly all my life, I have been irreverent about religious rituals. Now I find myself asking people to pray. Perhaps one of the numerous gods Indians pray to might have mercy on my writhing country.
Mukherjee worked as a journalist for India’s oldest English language newspaper, The Statesman. She earned a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston and teaches at Grand Valley State University.
"Opinion" - Google News
April 24, 2021 at 04:45AM
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Opinion: Pray for India and send COVID aid - Houston Chronicle
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