Social-Media
As India battles a COVID-19 outbreak, social media sites have become triage centers.
As new coronavirus cases and deaths in India reached record highs, doctors, hospital owners, journalists, and Twitter users have been tweeting and amplifying appeals for oxygen supplies on social media platforms. In India, oxygen supplies are at critical low levels, and some hospitals are overburdened with COVID-19 patients.
Many people in India are looking for ICU beds, oxygen, and plasma, and others are trying to link them with suppliers using hashtags like #CovidSOS and #COVIDEmergency2021. As organisations like HumanKind Global try to track down leads to aid them, groups on WhatsApp and Facebook have been inundated with messages from people in need of ICU beds, oxygen, and other supplies.
Oxygen supply to last only half an hour now, more than 200 lives are at stake. We lost 20 people amid an oxygen shortage last night: DK Baluja, Jaipur Golden Hospital#CovidSOS Call from A Delhi Hospital #COVIDEmergency2021 https://t.co/htE5HNgoze
— Hemant Rajaura (@hemantrajora_) April 24, 2021
“Not only there is lack of oxygen supply for those who can’t get medical aid in a hospital, the hospitals too are scurrying for oxygen,” journalist Abhishek Baxi wrote in an email to The Verge. Over the past several days, Baxi said, pleas for oxygen supplies on Twitter have increased “because they’ve not had any response from the authorities. There are updates on news channels about X hospital left with only few hours of oxygen or Y hospital optimizing supply to patients because they’ve got only 2 hours of oxygen supply left. These hospitals, their hands tied, have requested patients to go elsewhere – something not possible in a city where all hospitals are bursting at the seams.”
According to the Hindustan Times, 20 patients died on Saturday in a New Delhi hospital due to a lack of oxygen.
A second wave of COVID-19 cases has hit India. On Saturday, India recorded 349,691 new cases, a new high, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource center. On Saturday, the country recorded 2,767 deaths from COVID-19, a new high. According to the Johns Hopkins data, only about 1.6 percent of the country's population has been completely vaccinated.
According to the New York Times, the situation could be much worse than the figures say, with Indian officials downplaying or overlooking COVID-19 deaths. Furthermore, at the request of the Indian government, Twitter censored more than 50 posts critical of the government's handling of the recent coronavirus outbreak, making the tweets inaccessible inside India. According to the New York Times, the Indian government has also requested posts to be deleted from Facebook and Instagram.
