A catastrophic second wave of COVID-19 has overwhelmed India’s already creaky health infrastructure, with hospitals running out of beds and oxygen, while critical drugs are being sold on a thriving black market.
Social media platforms have been flooded with SOS messages from people pleading for oxygen cylinders and hospital admissions as authorities struggled to cope with the scale of the crisis.
Amid the shortage, many places of worship, including mosques and gurdwaras, across India have come forward to help needy patients and a number of them have been turned into care centres for COVID patients.
Mufti Arif Falahi, head of a seminary in the western city of Baroda, has taken on a different job over the past weeks: saving lives. A part of Falahi’s seminary in the western state of Gujarat, home to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been turned into a makeshift care centre for COVID patients.
“Every day, we have to turn away 50-60 people because we can only accommodate 142 with oxygen support,” Falahi told Al Jazeera over the phone.
On May 10, India recorded 3,754 deaths, a slight dip after two consecutive days of more than 4,000 deaths. Daily infections stood at more than 360,000.