Relatives carry a woman who fainted after seeing the body of her husband at a government COVID-19 hospital in Ahmedabad, India, Tuesday, April 27, 2021. Coronavirus cases in India are surging faster than anywhere else in the world. (AP Photo/Ajit Solanki) 
A Covid-19 patient on a wheel chair goes for a medical test inside a government hospital in Kolkata, India, 27 April, 2021. The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday it was stepping up efforts to help India as hospitals there struggled to cope with a huge surge in coronavirus cases, including bringing in oxygen and other essential supplies according to an Indian media report. (Photo by Indranil Aditya/NurPhoto via AP)
The first week of May has brought no relief to India, where surging cases of COVID-19 continue to dismantle the healthcare system. Since the start of the new month, nearly 400,000 people are getting sick with the virus every single day. Experts fear the devastating caseload is still nowhere near its peak.
Weston Davis is the country director for ADRA in India and in a recent Facebook Live interview he described the harrowing situation.
Watch ADRA team in India share crisis update
“Many, many people know someone who has perished,” he said, reflecting on the common belief that the official COVID-19 death toll in India falls far short of the reality. “Some experts say, ‘whatever number you hear, multiply that times ten and you’ll be getting close.’”
As of May 5, the Ministry of Health and Welfare in India reported that 230,168 people have died of COVID-19. Nearly 4,000 of those deaths occurred on May 5 alone. Experts insist the number is much higher.
“Our healthcare system was not ready to cope with such a large caseload,” said Trisha Mahajan, the communications manager for ADRA in India. “The cases had subsided a lot in February and people had thought that COVID in India was almost over. This second wave took people by surprise.”
Mahajan described the fear and chaos in India right now.
“People are dying from preventable deaths because they are not getting oxygen on time, or not getting hospital beds on time, or not getting basic medicines on time,” she said. “My social medias are filled with people asking for leads on hospital beds or oxygen cylinders. People are just losing their lives outside of hospitals. Even crematoriums are cramped. There is no space. They are being turned into places to burn the dead—even in the parking lots of these crematoriums, fires are being burned.”
“It is very tragic what is happening,” she added. “We are all very scared at the moment.”
Though several of our frontline staff have gotten sick with—and recovered from—COVID-19, the ADRA team in India remains safe, even as they continue their tireless fight against COVID-19. Recently, ADRA’s COVID-19 Task Force committed to the following in India:
- Support vaccine clinics in hard-hit Delhi
- Supply Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to Pune Adventist Hospital and Bangalore Adventist Hospital, while ramping up support in nine other Adventist hospitals in hard-hit areas in India
- Provide a much-needed Oxygen Generation Plant to METAS Adventist Hospital, the largest Adventist hospital in India
The greatest need in India remains access to oxygen. The COVID-19 virus targets the respiratory system and for those who are in critical condition, access to oxygen is essential. Unfortunately, in India that access remains limited.
“When someone is under respiratory distress, they are given oxygen,” Davis said. “Early on in the crisis, healthcare facilities [in India] began to run out of oxygen.”
While the oxygen crisis is immense in scope, it is also intimate and deeply personal. Davis shared an anecdote of a friend in Delhi who scoured the city looking for oxygen cylinders to give to a family with two members in critical condition. After hours of desperate searching, the friend found only one cylinder.
“The family had to make a decision: which person receives the oxygen?” Davis shared. “They made the decision and the other person passed away.”
Right now, in India, this scenario is tragic but not uncommon. Thousands are dying every single day for lack of oxygen.
To combat that stark reality, ADRA is in the process of airlifting an Oxygen Generation Plant from Italy to the largest Adventist hospital in India, a 300-bed facility that has been converted into a COVID-19 hospital.
Located in the hard-hit state of Gujarat in western India, METAS Adventist Hospital has already treated 10,000 cases of COVID-19, a feat that has required access to countless numbers of oxygen cylinders. These cylinders are in short supply due to a supply chain that has been fragmented by the crisis, and doctors are faced with the heartbreaking choice of who to save.
“I was talking to a healthcare professional in the U.S. a couple days ago about the oxygen shortage,” Davis shared. “He said, ‘all we do here is go over to the wall and plug it in. We never think about a shortage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to be making those decisions about who gets oxygen.’”
By providing an Oxygen Generation Plant to the largest Adventist hospital in India, ADRA is working to make sure everyone who needs lifesaving access to oxygen will get it. Rather than being forced to rely on expensive, small-capacity, and increasingly inaccessible oxygen cylinders, METAS Adventist Hospital in Gujarat will be able to produce their own medical grade oxygen on location and save thousands of lives in the coming weeks and months.
“The support we’re receiving from ADRA and the people who believe in ADRA is humbling and we’re eternally grateful for that, but it is only as good as our ability to distribute it,” Davis said. “No one wants to see aid stuck in bottlenecks. We have the tremendous opportunity to coordinate with an entire hospital system throughout India that already exists. By us coordinating with those teams, we can identify the best place for our relief to go and already have a built-in network. We know that as soon as it arrives at these hospitals, it will be immediately utilized.”
This partnership with the Adventist hospitals in India is strong and allows ADRA to deliver lifesaving resources that will immediately benefit thousands of the most vulnerable.
While the partnership between ADRA and the network of Adventist hospitals is strong, the needs remain immense.
“India needs all the support it can get,” Mahajan said. “We are very, very thankful for everyone who is praying for us, who is supporting us.”
Davis agrees. “We are eternally grateful for the donations small or large. It all works together.”
Please work together with ADRA right now to ensure that the most vulnerable in India receive the lifesaving support they need. Your donations mean oxygen and medicine for people dying of COVID-19.
To see the full interview with Davis and Mahajan, visit ADRA on Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube.
