Twelve hours, 250 phone calls, ten time zones: the hunt for one cylinder of oxygen in Kolkata. From 1843mag
n Tuesday morning I woke up to a text. “Do you know of anyone doing home testing?” it said. “Need urgently for granny. Also oxygen cylinder? URGENT.” It was the third such plea that I’d received in as many days.
“If only you’d called half an hour ago, you’d have got it!” he said. Half an hour ago, I was busy calling the other 31 numbers.he health-care system in West Bengal, of which Kolkata is capital, has all but collapsed in a matter of weeks. Until early April you could go to hospital to get oxygen, or buy a cylinder with a doctor’s prescription or a positive test result. Now hospitals are running out of beds and, even with a test or prescription, finding oxygen requires frenzied crowdsourcing.
We realised how bad the situation was only two days before Modi’s rally, when my partner tried to get a home test and failed. “We’re all out of kits,” someone at the end of the line mumbled and slammed the phone down. Early the next morning, she went to a hospital where she was in 100th place on the waiting list. Official figures show that West Bengal recorded 100,000 new cases in the past week alone . And it is far from the worst-affected part of the country.
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