By Shivangi Mathew
COVID-19 hits India worse than ever. The cases have started to rise again. India's deadly second COVID wave has devastated big cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow and Pune.
Hospitals and crematoriums have run out of space; funerals are taking place in car parks. The pandemic has now firmly gripped many smaller cities, towns and villages where the devastation is largely under-reported.
Patients running from pillar to post, searching for hospital beds. Morgues are running out of stretchers. Oxygen supplies and hospital beds remain in desperately short supply across India.
Relatives of COVID patients plead on social media for help.
Cremation grounds bursting at the seams with funeral pyres. People have even utilised parking lots near cremation grounds to give the COVID-stricken some semblance of dignity in their final moments.
Even as the crematorium staff slog from 6 a.m. to midnight, relatives wait for five to six hours to dispose of the dead.
The recent surge has brought panic and pain to millions across the nation, as they frantically try to navigate the country’s collapsing health care system. Thousands are taking to social media for help in a bid to secure a vacant hospital bed, a supply of oxygen or the antiviral medication remdesivir.
Social media and youth stood hand-in-hand as a digital COVID helpline. The common man and celebrities are all working together as one trying to help and reach as many people as they can during such tough times; arranging donors, oxygen concentrators, hospital beds, plasma and whatever the patient needs to survive. This is aided via Instagram stories and posts among other social platforms.
Where the government machinery failed, India's youth harnessed the power of social media to enable their fellow countrymen to access critical healthcare and survive.
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