For many Indians, the additional capacity will come too late. Vinay Srivastava was a 65-year-old retired journalist in the city of Lucknow. His family, like thousands of others in India, faced a gauntlet of obstacles when he contracted covid. Over two days, he documented the deterioration of his condition on Twitter. After Srivastava’s oxygen levels plunged on April 16, his son Harshit managed to find an empty cylinder and fill it. His father’s condition improved briefly, but by the next morning, his blood oxygen level had fallen to 70 percent, a level considered life-threatening. When Harshit tried to get his father admitted to a covid ward, he was turned away from the same hospital twice. He was told that he would need both a positive result on a specific type of coronavirus test called an RT-PCR and a referral letter from a senior medical official. The former would take two days. The latter proved impossible to obtain, even after Harshit tried to visit the official in person. His father’s tweets told of the family’s desperation: “No hospitals, labs or doctors are picking up the phone,” he wrote on April 16. When a government official asked for more details the next day, Srivastava replied with a photo of his pulse oximeter reading. “My oxygen is 31 when [someone] will help me,” reads the last tweet from his account. Harshit said his father collapsed soon after.