When the city was being swept away under the onslaught of the second wave of COVID-19, it was volunteer groups which came to the rescue. Chahak Mittal finds out some stories of resilience, faith and patience
8.45 am: I wake up with a jolt and reach out for my phone and open a WhatsApp group I’ve pinned on top these days. My immediate concern is if Mr Pathak had found a ventilator bed for his mother in North Delhi, a request that came in late last night. I had sent two verified leads, post which I slept, guiltily. To my heart’s relief, the 33-year-old man had met his requirement through the contact. I scroll further and the task for the day seems ready. My friend’s father, Mr Ramnarayan in Bengaluru, has been prescribed Tocilizumab and his daughter is frantically searching for the medicine as the hospital has run out of supplies.
9.00 am: In another group, a request lands for oxygen concentrator in Delhi and I tweet it right away, mentioning between asterisks that ‘the patient is just 27’ and also, forwarding the message to other groups. I am looking for leads for the respective cases by cross-messaging and shifting between social media platforms.
2.00 pm: While I have received 10 contacts for the concentrator, my call log indicates 38 other calls already made in a hunt for the Tocilizumab. I dial the 10 contacts and much to my disappointment, only one gives hope.
5.30 pm: I have lost track of the number of calls I have made today, perhaps 60-70. I even memorise a few numbers now which are being shared over and over again but to no avail. I have found two leads for the Tocilizumab. While one says it will be available tomorrow evening, the other requires full payment before delivery. Leaving this decision on the patient’s family, I pass on a verified lead for the concentrator to the Delhi patient.
8.45 pm: I have failed to arrange the medicine for the Bengaluru man despite making desperate calls. I am exhausted and begin to imagine and feel pity for the plight of his daughter. While the concentrator will be delivered by tomorrow morning, my mind is still not at ease.
Next day, 11.00 am: The concentrator has been delivered without any hassle. The 27-year-old patient’s family is thankful. I shed a tear of relief! My focus is back on finding more sources for the Tocilizumab while 20 other requests pile up in my notifications box.
3.00 pm: I learn that Mr Ramnarayan will never need Tocilizumab, or any other medicine now. The search is over. A hope has been killed. Another pyre is being set up. I don’t know the man but the grief of his death consumes me, leaves me agitated and helpless like never before. Was an advance and a hefty payment for a medicine more important than a life?
3.30 pm: I feel like quitting but another request for an oxygen bed in the city makes me recollect my thoughts, which do not agree on giving up on another life battling hard.
As the second wave racked every nerve of the country in April, this timeline with few variations became the routine for many people along with juggling WFH. While the demands for resources may have lessened with the falling number of cases this month, the incidents which the volunteers share haunt them and give a detailed insight into the insides of a relief group formed due to the necessity that emerged out of the current pandemic.
The beginning
For Abu Sufiyan, founder of Purani Dilli Walo Ki Baatein, it began when some symptoms started to show among a few of his team members in early April, who were then asked to quarantine and work from home. He got himself tested for COVID-19. Even though the reports were negative, the symptoms were evident. Medical experts alerted him to stay at home since they felt it could be the new mutant spreading in India, which wasn’t being detected by the RTPCR tests though the symptoms turn out to be more severe.
He shared, “I started searching for resources for my team as a few of their family members had severe symptoms. And soon, social media and our group was flooded with requests from people in the capital who were looking for COVID resources desperately. There were SOS calls for hospital beds, plasma, Remdesivir, oxygen support, concentrators, cylinders and refillers, ventilator beds, other life-saving medicines like the Tocilizumab and even meals for those who stayed alone and couldn’t cook. The demands for ICU home setup followed soon after when people realised how hospitals were now too crowded, understaffed and unequipped. We started preparing lists of verified contacts for the respective needs and put them out as a consolidated information.”
Journalist Aditya Raj Kaul, who has been closely and endlessly working with over 500 volunteers, during the second wave to arrange required supplies for COVID-19 patients, said that an extremely dire situation like this demands every one of us to act responsibly. He said that the current struggle of finding oxygen supplies reminded him of his grandmother’s demise in 2003 due to the unavailability of oxygen support in time. “It had stayed with me,” he added, “and that’s how I started from one WhatsApp group to another and because of my good following on Twitter, I would amplify SOS calls and tag several accounts which could be connected to the cases. That’s how it grew after people personally started reaching out to me and I could help out more people from places like Jodhpur, areas of Jharkhand, UP and Jammu. In the initial days, we used to get more than 300-500 requests a day, which were different from those 1,000s we received on WhatsApp groups.”
Depleting resources, common challenges and evolving strategies
While the information was being verified and shared through personal handles and social media toolkits, due to the rising number of cases and demands, they soon fell short. Abu added, “After a few hours of creating a list of available resources, they would exhaust and hence, would be of no use to people whom it reached by the end of the day. This became one of the major challenges and hence, we started to mention the date and time when a resource was verified for use and a disclaimer for its limited availability.”
Chennai-based independent journalist and part of a volunteer group in the city, Manasa R, pointed out at how suppliers seemed to have run out of stock in most scenarios, due to which the meaning of ‘a verified contact’ changed each day. She said, “From hospitals to officials, they stopped attending the calls when the cases surged. The lines were either busy or unavailable or they’d hang up. Out of 200 calls, two would respond only in the negative. The most unique challenge was the process of verification. After we added a supplier’s contact to the database, who could help us find an oxygen cylinder, the supplier would later run out of stock and stop answering calls. And we had to start finding new suppliers from a scratch.”
Aeshal Fatima, class 12th student and Delhi-based volunteer, part of nine such groups on WhatsApp, pointed towards the non-functioning of Google spreadsheets, which had been circulated majorly around social media. “No matter how many times I updated the sheet with a verified lead, the contact soon would go out of reach or the resources they had available got exhausted since hospitals were running out of oxygen on an hourly basis,” said she.
While finding the supplies was a major issue, their reasonability and affordability became a concern soon after. Pointing towards the challenge that unfolded — unreasonable prices of oxygen cylinders or concentrators due to the high demand, she said, “This is the worst thing someone could do to the one who’s already suffering. And the sadder part is that in such a life-and-death situation, one has no choice but to give in, no matter the cost.”
Haunting stories of victory AND demise
It was 2 am when Kaul received a request from Bengaluru for a 26-year-old girl, whose parents were unable to find a hospital bed. Kaul and his team started working on the case right away, got the girl admitted to a hospital, however, to their disappointment, the girl passed away the same night at 4.30. “One of the volunteers, closely associated with the case, broke down and couldn’t come to terms with the fact that we were unable to help save her,” he shared.
On her second day as a volunteer, Aeshal came across a request on one of the groups she was part of for an oxygen cylinder in Lucknow. She said, “I sent a few leads and went to sleep with guilt and fear within. I woke up to see that the patient had found the cylinder and was relieved to hear this. That was the first time when I was really motivated to help out as many people as I can during these tough times and I made sure I dedicated myself to it also given the obligation one feels after coming across a request.”
While there were stories of victory and demise coming in, there were also certain cases where the already broken-down healthcare system meant that non-Covid patients had a tough time getting relief. Abu shared, “In one of the most unusual cases during those days, we came across a case of my friend’s house help’s daughter, who had fallen from the stairs and suffered a severe injury on head. Due to the unavailability of beds in hospitals, they were struggling to find a doctor and a bed for her. It took seven hospitals that night, all at different places, to get tests and MRI scans done. She was finally admitted to the eighth hospital.”
On the other hand, there are also stories of resilience, faith and patience which passed the test of time and emerged. Manasa shared how her cousin was unable to find a bed for her younger brother for over eight days, “the longest a case took to close,” due to which she began losing hope. “I cried in relief when a combination of luck, perseverance and a personal contact” of the family worked in helping the patient. When she shared the story with other volunteers in the group, who were not involved in the case, they listened patiently, celebrated with her as though the patient was one of their own. “Well, everything is significant — a person being saved, a person dying, a person not receiving the resources on time, a person actually managing to find a resource. We, as volunteers, although, are quite careful about our boundaries with patients and their kin, in a time like this, we are all invested in each of them in some way or the other,” she added.
