“They keep asking us to bring our own oxygen"

The latest data suggests that Covid-19 tests in New Delhi are at about a 30% positivity rate, said Navin Dang, a microbiologist and chairman of Delhi-based Dr. Dang’s Labs. He said the lockdown hasn’t reduced their ability to administer Covid-19 tests, but many of their test takers have been infected... At 5 a.m. on Saturday, Aparna Bansal’s cellphone rang. “Can you come now?” said a man from the New Delhi hospital where her 76-year-old father is being treated for Covid-19. The instructions were clear, she said: Bring oxygen or take your father away. Her husband lines up at 4 a.m. every morning at an oxygen-supply store in east Delhi to buy two cylinders of oxygen to take to separate hospitals treating her mother and father. Neither facility has enough supply to treat the waves of patients coming through every hour. “I start getting palpitations every time I get a call from the two hospitals. It feels like I’ve left my parents to die,” she said. “They keep asking us to bring our own oxygen. We are not even sure whether the oxygen we bring every day is being used for our parents or goes somewhere else. We can’t shift them anywhere and we can’t be there either.”... “There are more than 300 bodies in waiting, they are lying everywhere on the grounds and even on the roads outside,” said Pawan Kumar, a shopkeeper outside the crematorium who sells funeral items required in Hindu cremation. Relatives are in tears, making desperate calls to arrange for space at other cremation sites and sometimes taking bodies away to burn them where space is available, like on the river bank. “The very scene is driving us mad,” said Mr. Kumar.
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