BBC journalists recall the horrors of India’s blocking five years

On March 24, 2020, India announced its first Covid lock, just as the world stood on the edge of a global pandemic that would take millions of lives.

The already fragile healthcare system in India collapsed under the weight of the pandemic.

The WHO estimated 4.7 million deaths In India – almost 10 times the bigger than the official issue – but the government has rejected the figure, citing shortcomings in the methodology.

Five years later, BBC India journalists are thinking about their experience, telling how sometimes they became part of the story they covered.

Soutik Biswas, BBC News

It was the summer of 2021

I woke up in the fierce voice of a teacher at school. Her 46-year-old husband fought Covid at a hospital in Delhi, where oxygen was as scarce as hope.

Here again we go, I thought he was afraid. And it was just another day in a city where breathing itself became a privilege.

We were confronted with help, spent calls, sending messages to SOS, hoping someone had a presenter.

Her voice shook when she told us that her husband’s oxygen levels had decreased to 58. She had to be 92 or higher. He slipped, but she clung to the little comfort that he had climbed to 62. He was still conscious, still talking. So far.

But how long can this last? I was wondering. How much more life would be lost because the basics – oxygen, beds, medicines – were out of reach? This should not happen in 2021 not here.

The woman called back. The hospital did not even have an oxygen flow measurer, she said. She had to find one herself.

We reached again. The phones are buzzing, the tweets flew in the void, hoping someone see us. Finally, there was a device – a small victory in the sea of ​​despair. Oxygen will flow. So far.

However, the numbers do not lie.

A report from the same hospital told about a 40-year-old man who died in anticipation of a bed. He found a stretcher, at least the report is useful. It was there that we were now: thankful for a place to lie down.

Before that, oxygen was a commodity. So were the medicines, in shortage and stored by those who could pay. People died because they could not breathe, and the city was suffocated by their own apathy.

It was a war. I felt like a war. And we lost it.

Yogita Limaye, BBC News

“Balaji, why you lie like that,” a woman yelled in front of Delhi’s GTB hospital, shook her unconscious brother, lying on a stretcher.

Minutes later, her brother, the father of two, died and waited outside the hospital before he was even seen by a doctor.

I will never forget her cry.

Around her, the families prayed at the hospital’s door to make a doctor come and see their loved ones.

They were among the hundreds of requests that we heard during the weeks we announced how the second wave of Covid, which began in March 2021, took a nation to its knees.

It was as if people were left to deal with a vicious pandemic themselves – moving from hospital to hospital, looking for beds and oxygen.

The second wave had does not come without warning, But the government of India, which declared victory over the disease two months earlier, was caught unprepared by resumption.

At a large hospital ICU, I saw that the chief doctor was rising up and down, making one phone call after another frantic demand for oxygen supplies.

“Only one hour of delivery remains. Reduce the oxygen that we deliver to our patients to the lowest levels needed to ensure that all organs continue to function properly,” he instructed, his face is tense.

I remember the warmth and vapors of 37 funeral pirates, which burn at the same time under the April Sun at Delhi’s Crematorium.

People sat in shock – they still did not feel the grief and anger that would come – at first glance, stunned in silence of the frightening speed at which Covid devastated the capital.

Our working messages are buzzing all the time with another colleague, desperately needed a hospital bed for a loved one.

No one was untouched by him.

In Pune, my father was recovering from a heart attack associated with Covid, which he had suffered a month earlier.

Returning to my hometown of Mumbai, one of my closest friends was critical of a fan at a hospital.

After five weeks in ICU, miraculously, he recovered. But my father’s heart is never a rule and a year later he suffered a fatal heart attack, leaving a constant hole in our lives.

Covid-19 will always be the hardest story I have ever covered.

Vikas Pandy, BBC News

Covering a pandemic was the most difficult job in my life because it is a story that literally came home.

Friends, relatives and neighbors called every day, begging for the purchase of oxygen cylinders, hospital beds and even major medicines. At that time, I interviewed several grieving families.

Still, several incidents remained in my memory.

In 2021 I reported The story of Altuf ShamsiWhich summarizes the unimaginable pain that millions have gone through.

His pregnant wife and father were infected with the virus and were admitted to various hospitals in Delhi. He knew me through a friend and called me to ask me if I could help him find another doctor after the hospital where his father was admitted, he was told that the chances of survival were zero. As he spoke to me, he received another call from the doctor of his wife, who said they lacked oxygen for her.

He lost his father first and later sent me a message: “I watched his body as I read SOS messages from the Rehab hospital (his wife) for oxygen.”

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

The other two incidents approached home than anything else.

He worsened very quickly after being admitted to hospital.

It was placed on a fan and the doctors made a gloomy forecast. One of them advised to try an experimental medicine that had shown some results in the UK.

I was twisted and called everyone I thought could help. It is difficult to put this powerlessness into words – it was sinking with each passing hour, but the medicine that could potentially save it was not found anywhere.

One kind doctor helped us with one injection, but we needed three more. Then someone read my tweet and reached out – she had bought three vials for her father, but he died before doses could be given. I took her help and my relative survived.

But the cousin didn’t. He was admitted to the same hospital. His oxygen levels were immersed every hour and it had to be placed on a fan, but the hospital was not free.

I made calls all night.

The next morning, the hospital leaks from oxygen, leading to many deaths, including his. He left behind his wife and two young children. I still wonder if I had more that I could do.

Geeta Pandy, BBC News

In the morning, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a difficult lock, I went to Delhi’s main bus station. The only people on the street were the police and paramilitary organizations located to ensure that people remain indoors.

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

As the virus makes the road in the next few months and the capital – along with the rest of the country – remained under strict exclusion, tragedy lurks at every corner.

We were afraid to go out and were afraid to stay inside.

All hopes – including mine – were nailed to a vaccine that scientists around the world competed to develop.

I last followed my mother, on a bed in our village of the ancestors 450 miles (724 km) from Delhi, in January 2020, just a few months before the blocking. My mother, like millions of other people, did not really understand what Covid was – a disease that suddenly disturbed their lives.

Every time I called, she had only one question: “When will you visit?” The fear that I could carry the virus at her at a time when she was most vulnerable, kept me far.

On January 16, 2021, I was at Max Hospital in Delhi when India took out the largest worldwide pursuit of vaccination, promising to vaccinate all adults in the country of 1.4 billion people. Doctors and medical staff there defined him as “New Dawn”. Some told me that they would visit their families as soon as they received their second doses.

I called my mother and told her I would get my vaccine and visit her soon. But a week later she was gone.

Anagha Pathak, BBC Marathi

A few days after India announced the blocking, I traveled to the Maharashtra State to document the impact of the restrictions.

It was three in the morning as I was moving on the ominously empty Mumbai-Ara highway. My hometown of Nashik seemed unrecognizable.

Instead of traffic, the migrants filled the way, walking home, torn and unemployed. Among them was a young couple from Uttar Pradesh. They had worked as workers in Mumbai. The wife, still in the early 20s, was pregnant. They hoped to get on a truck, but that didn’t happen. By the time they reached Nashik, they had exhausted food, water and money.

I will never forget to see the pregnant woman, her fragile body walking under the hot sun. I had never felt more unknown. Covid’s protocols prevented me from offering them a ride. All I could do was give them some water and snacks while documenting their trip.

A few miles ahead about 300 people were waiting for a government bus to take them to the state border. But nowhere was there a view. After making some calls, two buses finally arrived – they are still not enough. But I made sure that the couple got on the one who headed to Madheya Pradesh, where they had to catch another bus.

I followed them in my car and waited for a while to catch their next bus. It never came.

In the end, I left. I was tasked with finishing.

Five years have passed and I’m still wondering: the woman did it at home? Has she survived? I don’t know her name, but I still remember her tired eyes and the fragile body.

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