Out of oxygen, out of time: covid-19 suffocates Kolkata

By Sudipto Sanyal

On Tuesday morning I woke up to a text. “Do you know of anyone doing home testing?” it said. “Need urgently for granny. Also oxygen cylinder? URGENT.” It was the third such plea that I’d received in as many days.

The message came from a friend whose grandmother lives in New Town, a wealthy enclave to the east of Kolkata, where private hospitals serve gated communities. But when my friend’s grandmother developed a cough and a fever, and her oximeter showed worryingly low levels of blood oxygenation, there was no one to help her. Local doctors were overwhelmed. They were running out of test kits, out of oxygen, out of time.

I got to work searching for oxygen suppliers, scrolling through websites that have sprung up in recent weeks with names like “Covid Resources West Bengal”. The phone numbers I found didn’t work, were eternally engaged or just rang and rang without an answer. Of the 32 numbers I called, only one person responded: Bilas, who runs what is advertised as a 24/7 oxygen-supply service. He told me I had just missed his last cylinder.

“If only you’d called half an hour ago, you’d have got it!” he said. Half an hour ago, I was busy calling the other 31 numbers.

The health-care system in West Bengal, of which Kolkata is capital, has all but collapsed in a matter of weeks. Until early April you could go to hospital to get oxygen, or buy a cylinder with a doctor’s prescription or a positive test result. Now hospitals are running out of beds and, even with a test or prescription, finding oxygen requires frenzied crowdsourcing.

Improvised health directories have sprung up on social media. Friends share spreadsheets which list dwindling resources: hospitals that still have beds or ventilators, doctors who are still answering calls, vendors still selling oxygen. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have turned into helplines. People have been posting and verifying possible sources of plasma donations on Discord, a popular chat app.

“If only you’d called half an hour ago, you’d have got it!”

The scale and ferocity of the second wave has caught the Indian government off-guard. On Wednesday the country registered 3,293 deaths in 24 hours. Last year, the first wave of covid-19 seemed to pass without catastrophic consequences, which put Narendra Modi, the prime minister, in a bullish mood.

This month the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which Modi leads, continued to hold big campaign events in West Bengal’s legislative elections even as cases rose (it eventually suspended them, fractionally later than its rivals). Just two weeks ago, on April 17th, Modi himself addressed a vast rally in the state’s second city, boasting that he’d “never seen such crowds”. Now the BJP’s banners are fluttering over shuttered shops, a throwback to a different time.

We realised how bad the situation was only two days before Modi’s rally, when my partner tried to get a home test and failed. “We’re all out of kits,” someone at the end of the line mumbled and slammed the phone down. Early the next morning, she went to a hospital where she was in 100th place on the waiting list. Official figures show that West Bengal recorded 100,000 new cases in the past week alone (experts say the real figures in India could be ten or more times higher than official estimates). And it is far from the worst-affected part of the country.

He told me I had just missed his last cylinder

“This is just the beginning of the second wave in Bengal,” a doctor who works for the central government told me. “No one is aware of the actual scenario – the facts and figures are all blurry.” Vaccines are reportedly running short. The long queues that stretch around hospitals as people try to get their jabs are an indicator of their scarcity.

Towards the end of Tuesday afternoon, my friend gave up trying to get a test for her grandmother. The soonest she could get one was Wednesday morning, but she worried that such a delay in getting oxygen might be fatal. She thought briefly about sending her to hospital, but it was a risk, even supposing she could secure a bed. If her grandmother didn’t have covid when she went in, she’d probably catch it there.

We focused on trying to get a prescription for oxygen. We had found some volunteer organisations who still seemed to have supplies for those with proof of need. The doctor whom my friend’s grandmother usually saw wasn’t answering the phone, but perhaps we could find one who would.

By 4.30pm a doctor had been located and a photo of a prescription sent over WhatsApp. But that wasn’t the end of our labours. Demand had so outstripped supply that many places offering oxygen in the morning had run out by mid-afternoon.

We contemplated increasingly wild ideas. An Indian friend texted from Washington, DC: “Hey, it looks like I can buy and ship oxygen concentrators via FedEx.” I started texting my oldest friend, now a doctor in Ohio, for advice, even though he was ten time zones away. More people sent us more numbers.

Eventually, some 12 hours and 250 calls after we started our search, someone phoned my friend back. A volunteer group had oxygen and was prepared to deliver it. One family got a lucky break, but many others did not. In the coming days their number will only increase.■

Sudipto Sanyal is assistant professor of English at Techno India University in Kolkata

PHOTOGRAPHS: SWASTIK PAL