As someone who was once a longtime Delhi resident, I am part of several of the city’s vast number of WhatsApp groups. Every one has been full of requests for help during the past three weeks. The number of people with COVID-19 in Delhi — with a population density of 13,861 persons per square kilometer and a total of 20.5 million people — has risen dramatically. Hospitals have run out of beds. There are not enough intensive care beds and ventilators. There is a shortage of oxygen and essential drugs for patients.

Even mortuaries, crematoria, and burial grounds have run out of space. Death is stalking the city. Every day brings news of the loss of friends, acquaintances, or their loved ones. Social media is awash with requests for leads on hospital beds, intensive care beds, ventilators, oxygen cylinders, oxygen concentrators, plasma donors, and drugs such as remdesivir and tocilizumab. The oxygen shortage is so acute that multiple incidents have been reported of patients dying as a result.

Delhi gets the most media coverage, but the crisis is not confined there. There have been reports of patients dying due to oxygen shortages in a number of states, including Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, and Karnataka. The country’s first COVID-19 wave peaked in mid-September 2020, and the numbers continued to fall until late February 2021 (the fifteenth of that month saw 9,086 new cases). But since then, and particularly since mid-March, new infections have been climbing rapidly.