MUMBAI - As Poonam Sinha fought for her life, her distraught son found himself fending off black marketeers for coronavirus drugs after the Indian hospital treating her ran out of supplies.
In the middle of the night, he got a call informing him that the hospital had now exhausted its stock of oxygen, making his mother's condition even more precarious. In the northern city of Lucknow, Ahmed Abbas was charged 45,000 rupees for a 46-litre oxygen cylinder, nine times its normal price.The crisis has added to criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, already under fire for allowing huge religious gatherings and addressing crowded political rallies himself."Patients should only be given as much oxygen as they need," Goyal told reporters.
"One solution to this crisis was to create a stockpile of antiviral drugs when cases were low, but that did not happen," said Raman Gaikwad, an infectious diseases specialist at Sahyadri Hospital in the western city of Pune. Content creator Srishti Dixit, 28, told AFP she received a new request for help every 30 seconds, creating a huge backlog.
"I am not always successful, I am sure there are lapses... but hopefully it is helping people at least on an individual level", she said.