BBC journalists remember the horrors of closing India for five years

On March 24, 2020, India announced its first insurance, just as the world was on the brink of a global pandemic that would demand millions of lives.

The fragile health care system has already collapsed in India under the weight of the epidemic.

It is estimated by the World Health Organization 4.7 million Kofid deaths In India – nearly 10 times the official count – but the government rejected this number, noting the faults in the methodology.

Five years later, the BBC journalists India reflected their experiences in telling how, sometimes, part of the story they were covering.

Soutik Biswas, BBC News

It was the summer of 2021.

I woke up to the shining voice of the school teacher. Her 46 -year -old husband was fighting Kovid at Delhi Hospital, where oxygen was rare like hope.

Here we go again, I thought, dismay crawl. India was besieged in a deadly fist of the deadly dead wave of infections, with Delhi in its heart. Another day was in a city where breathing itself became a privilege.

We have stood on a request for help, making calls, and sending SOS messages, hoping that someone will have the initiative.

She shook her voice because she told us that her husband’s oxygen levels had decreased to 58. It should have been 92 or higher. He was slipping, but clung to the small comfort that rose to 62. He was still conscious, still speaking. for now.

But how long can this last? I wondered. How many lives will be lost because the basics – oxygen, family, medicine – were far from reach? This was not supposed to happen in 2021. Not here.

The woman contacted again. She said that the hospital had no even a scale of oxygen flow. She had to find herself.

We contacted again. The demolition of phones, the tweets flew into the vacuum, hoping that someone would see us. Finally, there was a device – a small victory in a sea of ​​despair. The oxygen will flow. for now.

The numbers were not lied, though.

A report from the same hospital was told about a 40 -year -old man who died waiting for the bed. It was found, at least, the report was added useful. This was where we were now: grateful for a place to put the dead.

In the face of this, the oxygen was a commodity. This is how medications were, in a lack of offer and storing them by those who could pay. People were dying because they could not breathe, and the city was suffocating on indifference.

This was a war. I felt like a war. We lost it.

Yogita Limaye, BBC News

A woman shouted out of GTB Hospital in Delhi: “Balji, why she lies like this”, shaking her unconscious brother who was lying on a stretcher.

Minutes later, her brother, the father of two children, died, waiting outside the hospital before seeing the doctor.

I will never forget her cry.

Those around her, she appealed to the families at the hospital door to get a doctor to come and see their loved ones.

They were among the hundreds of calls for the help that we heard over the weeks that we have informed about how the second wave of Covid, which started in March 2021, brought a nation to its knees.

It was as if people had left to treat an evil pandemic on their own – moving from hospital to the hospital in search of family and oxygen.

It was the second wave Do not come without warning, But the government of India, which declared its victory over the disease two months ago, was arrested not prepared due to resurrection.

In the intensive care unit of a major hospital, I saw the doctor who is going up and down, and made one phone call after another searching for oxygen supply.

“Only one hour of supply remains. The oxygen we provide to our patients reduced the lowest levels to ensure that all members continue to work properly,” he issued instructions to his deputy, presenting his face.

I clearly remember the heat and fumes from 37 funeral funerals simultaneously under the sun of April in the Delhi Holocaust.

People sat in a shock – they have not yet felt the sadness and anger that would come – apparently surprisingly in silence due to the frightening speed in which the capital was leaked.

Our business correspondence groups all the time were involved in the news of another colleague who strongly needs a hospital bed for a member of his family.

No one touched.

In Pion, my father was recovering from a heart attack related to the excitement he suffered a month ago.

Once again in my hometown of Mumbai, one of my close friends carry embarrassment on the hospital’s industrial respiratory.

After five weeks in the intensive care unit, miraculously, recover. But my father’s heart never did, and after a year, he had a fatal heart attack, leaving a permanent hole in our lives.

Covid-19 will always be the most difficult story that you have ever covered.

Vikas Pandy, BBC News

The coverage of the epidemic was the most difficult task in my life because it is a story that literally returned home.

Friends, relatives and neighbors called every day, and they asked to help buy oxygen cylinders, hospital family and even basic drugs. I met many sad families at the time.

However, some incidents remained engraved in my memory.

In 2021, I was informed Tof Shamsi storyAnd that summarizes the inconceivable pain of millions of bitter.

His pregnant wife and father were injured by the virus and confessed to various hospitals in Delhi. He knew me through a friend and called for a question whether I could help him find another doctor after the hospital, when his father was accepted, he told him that the chances of survival were zero. While he was talking to me, he received another call from his wife’s doctor, who said he was running out of oxygen for her.

He lost his father first and then wrote me later: “I was looking at his body, while reading SOS messages from Rehab’s Oxygen Hospital.”

A few days later, he lost his wife after she gave birth to their daughter.

The other two accidents approached the house more than anything else.

Soon soon after he was accepted to the hospital.

It was placed on the artificial respirator and gave doctors a dark diagnosis. One of them advised an experimenting drug that showed some results in the UK.

I tweeted and called everyone I thought it could help. It is difficult to put this frustration in the words – it was drowning with every passage hour, but the drug that could save it was not anywhere to find.

A good doctor helped us in one injection, but we needed three others. Then someone read my temptation and communicated with her – she bought three flasks for her father but died before he got the doses. I took her help and survived my relative.

But a cousin did not. He was accepted in the same hospital. Its oxygen levels were dipped every hour and needed to place the industrial respiratory system, but the hospital had no free.

I have been made calls all night.

The next morning, the hospital was run out of oxygen, which led to many deaths, including it. He left behind his wife and two young children. I am still wondering if there was something more that I could do.

Geta Pandnesse, BBC News

The next morning, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced difficult insurance, which went to the main bus station in Delhi. The only people in the streets were the police and sorting, which was deployed to ensure that people remain inside.

The bus station was deserted. A few hundred meters away, I met men, women and children who were looking for ways to get home, hundreds of miles away. During the next few days, these numbers swelled to millions, as people strongly tried to find a way to be with their families and loved ones.

When the virus split its way in the next few months, and the capital – alongside the rest of the country – remained under strict closure, the tragedy lies in every corner.

We were afraid to go out and fear staying in it.

All hopes – including me – have been installed on a vaccine that scientists around the world were racing to develop.

I visited my mother, bedridden in the village of our ancestors, 450 miles (724 km) from Delhi, in January 2020, just two months before the lock. My mother, like millions of other people, did not understand what Kovid – the disease that suddenly disrupted their life.

Every time she called her, she only had one question: “When will you visit?” Fear that I can carry the virus for it at a time when it was more likely to keep me away.

On January 16, 2021, I was at Max Hospital in Delhi when India launched the largest vaccination campaign in the world, and promised to vaccinate all 1.4 billion countries in the country. Doctors and medical employees there described it as “a new dawn.” Some told me that they would visit their families as soon as their second dose is received.

I called my mother and told her that I would get a vaccine and visit it soon. But after a week, it was gone.

Anagha Pathak, BBC MARATHI

A few days after India announced the lock, I was traveling to the borders of Maharashtra to document the effect of restrictions.

It was three in the morning while I was driving along the empty fast Mumbai-R. My hometown looked at your discussion unknown.

Instead of traffic, migrant workers filled the road, walked at home, fled and exited from work. Among them was a couple of two young men from the state of Uttar Pradesh. They worked as workers in Mumbai. The wife, who was still in her early twenties, was pregnant. They were hoping to ride a truck, but this did not happen. By the time they arrived at your Nashek, he ran out of food, water and money.

I will never forget to see a pregnant woman, and her fragile body that walks under the burning sun. I never felt more deficit. Covid protocols prevented me from making a trip. All I can do is give them some water and snacks, while documenting their journey.

A few miles away, about 300 people waited a government bus to transport them to the borders of the state. But he was not anywhere on the horizon. After making some calls, two finally arrived – still is not enough. But I made sure that the spouses went to the state of Maadi Pradesh, as they were supposed to pick up another bus.

I followed them in my car and waited for some time to take the next bus. It did not come.

In the end, I left. I had a mission to finish.

Five years have passed, and I still wonder: Did the woman make her at home? Have you survived? I don’t know her name, but I still remember her exhausting eyes and her fragile body.

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