‘People phone up pleading’: the volunteers battling India’s oxygen crisis Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
For more than two weeks the calls have kept on coming, sometimes over 1,000 a day. The voices on the end of Mohit Arora’s phone are desperate for only one thing: oxygen.
“We are getting 1,000 calls a day but we can only accommodate 10 to 15 cylinders a day, that’s it,” said Arora. “It’s very painful – people are calling and crying down the phone, pleading for oxygen all through the night.”
As a devastating Covid-19 second wave has enveloped India, the capital, Delhi, has found itself gasping for breath, as cases have soared and oxygen supplies have run low – and, in some hospitals, have run out entirely, leaving patients to die in their beds.
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