On March 24, 2020. India announced its first forged locking, just as the world stood on the verge of a global pandemic that would seek millions of lives.
The Indian already fragile health system collapsed under the weight of pandemic.
Who evaluated 4.7 million deaths In India – almost 10 times more than an official number – but the government rejected the character, citing flaws in methodology.
Five years later, BBC journalists India think about their experiences, recounting that they sometimes became part of the story they covered.
“Oxygen, oxygen, can you get my oxygen?”
Soutic Biswas, BBC News
It was summer 2021.
I woke up the angry voice of a school teacher. Her 46-year-old husband struggled with a man at a hospital in Delhi, where oxygen was as scarce as hope.
Here again, I thought, she was afraid of crawling inside. India was trapped in a deadly grip of a deadly second wave of infection, with Delhi in the heart. And it was just another day in the city where breathing became a privilege.
We hired for help, made calls, sent SOS messages, hoping that someone would have the lead.
Her voice shook her when she told us that her husband’s oxygen level fell to 58. She should have been 92 or more. He slid, but she clung to a little comfort that she climbed to the age of 62. He was still aware, he was still talking. For now.
But how long could this take? I wondered. How much more life would be lost because the basics – oxygen, beds, medicines – were out of reach? This did not need to happen in 2021. Not here.
The woman called. The hospital didn’t even have oxygen flow, she said. She had to find herself.
We reached again. The phones were buzzing, the tweets flew into the void, hoping someone would see us. Finally there was a device – a small victory in the sea of despair. Oxygen would flow. For now.
Still, the numbers did not lie.
A report of the same hospital said about a 40-year-old man who died waiting for the bed. At least he found a carrier. We were there now: grateful for the place to lay the dead.
On the eve of this, oxygen was a slave. So were medicines, in the absence and relaxed by those who could pay. People were dying because they couldn’t breathe, and the city was choking on their own apathy.
This was a war. He felt like war. And we lost it.
‘The hardest story I’ve ever covered’
Yogita Limaye, BBC News
“Balaji, why are you lying like this,” the woman screamed in front of the GTB hospital in Delhi, trembling her unconscious brother lying on the brackets.
A few minutes later, her brother, the father of two, died, waiting in front of the hospital before the doctor saw him at all.
I’ll never forget her cry.
Around her, the families prayed at the hospital door so that the doctor would come and visit their loved ones.
They were among the hundreds of pleas for help we heard over the weeks, we reported that the second wave of covida, which began in March 2021, brought the nation to our knees.
It was like people were left alone to deal with a vicious pandemia – leaving the hospital to the hospital in search of beds and oxygen.
The second wave had does not come without warning, But the Indian government, which had declared a victory over illness two months earlier, was caught by irreconcilable rise.
In ICU -I saw the main doctor in the big hospital as pace pace, making one phone call for another frantic searching for oxygen supplies.
“There is only one hour of supply. Reduce oxygen that we deliver to our patients at the lowest levels needed to ensure that all organs continue to function,” he sent his deputy, face tension.
I extremely remember the warmth and smoke from 37 funeral purees that gormed under the April Sun in the Delhi Crematorium.
People were sitting in shock – they still do not feel sad and anger that will come – seemingly amazed in silence at a terrifying speed that Covid devastated the capital.
Our work messaging groups kept buzzing the news about another colleague who desperately need a hospital bed for a loved one.
No one touched him.
In my full father, my father was recovering from a heart attack connected to the Kovada that had suffered a month earlier.
Returning to my hometown of Mumbai, one of my closest friends lying critical of the fan at the hospital.
After five weeks in Icu, in wonderful, he recovered. But my father’s heart never succeeded, and a year later he suffered a fatal heart attack, leaving a permanent hole in our lives.
The Covid-19 will always be the hardest story I have ever covered.
“Could I have done more?”
Vikas Pandey, BBC News
Pandemic coverage was the most difficult task of my life because it was a story that literally returned home.
Friends, relatives and neighbors were called every day, seeking help in the procurement of cylinders with oxygen, hospital beds, and even essential medicines. I interviewed several bereaved families at the time.
Still, several incidents are left in my memory.
2021 I reported The story of Altuf Shamsiwhich summarizes the unimaginable pain in the millions.
His pregnant wife and father were infected with a virus and were admitted to various hospitals in Delhi. He knew me through a friend and called me to ask him if I could help him find another doctor after a hospital where his father was admitted, told him that the chances of zero survival were. While talking to me, he received another call from his wife’s doctor who said he was running out of oxygen.
He lost his father first, and later sent me a message: “I watched his body, reading SOS messages from rehabilitation [his wife] Hospital for oxygen. ”
A few days later, he lost his wife after giving birth to their daughter.
Two other incidents approached home than anything else.
He got married relatively after he was admitted to the hospital.
It was placed on a fan and doctors gave a dark prognosis. One of them advised the experimental drug that showed some results in the UK.
I tweeted and called everything I thought I could help. It is difficult to convey that frustration into the word – he sank with every hour, but nowhere has he found a cure that could potentially save him.
A friendly doctor helped us with one injection, but we needed three more. Then someone read my tweet and reached – she got three bottles for his father, but he died before he could give him doses. I prayed to her and my cousin survived.
But the cousin is not. He was admitted to the same hospital. His oxygen level was soaked every hour and needed to be put on a fan, but the hospital did not have free.
I called all night.
The next morning, the hospital ran out of oxygen, which led to many deaths, including his. He left behind his wife and two young children behind him. I still wonder if he could do anything more.
‘We were afraid we were going out and we were afraid to stay inside’
Geeta Pandey, BBC News
The morning after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a hard lock, I headed to the main Delhi bus station. The only people on the streets were police and paramilos, deployed to ensure that people stay indoors.
The bus station was abandoned. A few hundred meters, I met men, women and children who sought ways to get home, hundreds of miles. Over the next few days, these numbers swelled into millions while people were desperate to find a way to be with their families and loved ones.
While the virus passed in the next few months and the capital – along with the rest of the earth – remained under strict shutdown, the tragedy was lurking on every corner.
We were afraid we were going out and we were afraid to stay inside.
All hopes – including mine – were nailed to the vaccine that scientists around the world were racing for development.
I last visited my mother, Bedidden in our ancestral village of 450 miles (724km) from Delhi, in January 2020, just a few months before the lock. My mother, like millions of other people, did not really understand what Coid is – a disease that suddenly disturbed their lives.
Every time I called, she only had one question, “When will you visit?” The fear that I could carry the virus into it at the time when he kept me the most endured.
On January 16, 2021, I was at Max Hospital in Delhi, when India cheered the world’s largest vaccination facility, promising the vaccination of all adults in the country of 1.4 billion people. Doctors and medical staff described it there as a “new dawn”. Some told me they would visit their families as soon as they got their second doses.
I called my mother and told her I would get a vaccine and visit her soon. But a week later, she is gone.
‘I’ve never felt this helpless’
Anagha Pathak, BBC Marathi
A few days after India announced the lock, I traveled to the border of the Maharashtra State to documented the impact of restrictions.
It was three in the morning as I drove a creepy empty Mumbai-Agra motorway. My hometown Nashik looked unrecognizable.
Instead of traffic, migrants workers filled the road, walked home, stranded and out of work. Among them was a young couple from Uttar Pradesh. They worked as workers in Mumbai. The wife, still in the early 20s, was pregnant. They hoped they would drive around the truck, but that didn’t happen. When they reached Nashik, they were running out of food, water and money.
I will never forget to see the pregnant woman, her fragile body walked under the bright sun. I never felt more helpless. Coidid protocols prevented me from offering them driving. All I could have given them some water and snacks, as I document their journey.
A few kilometers in front, about 300 people were waiting for the government bus to take them to the state border. But that was nowhere in sight. After making some calls, two buses finally arrived – not enough. But I made sure the couple headed for what he headed for Madhya Pradesh, where they needed to catch another bus.
I followed them in my car and waited for a while to catch my next bus. Never came.
Eventually I left. I had a task to finish.
It’s been five years, and I still ask myself: Did the woman go home? Did she survive? I don’t know her name, but I still remember her tired eyes and a fragile body.
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