This past week has been harrowing in India. You pick up the phone, and find that almost every close friend or relative has tested positive for COVID 19. Social media posts are utterly depressing to read, nearly all tweets are about people asking for help, for a hospital bed, for basic life saving drugs. A doctor friend of mine says he has been seeing 25 covid patients in a span of two hours.
Don’t ask me for a bed, he says, I can’t help anyone. This is how dire the situation has become. All around us, the callous response of our governments — both at the centre and states- is widely visible. With cases reaching well over 230,000 a day, India is in the middle of a health emergency.