As Indians’ social media feeds were filling up with pleas for oxygen and hospital beds last month, thirty-two-year-old Asad Ashraf, a journalist, emailed me a link to his tweet: “My mother’s condition is very critical and I need a bed in Patna.” A few days earlier, he was in Delhi. But as his mother’s COVID-19 infection worsened, he traveled 674 miles to reach home. Both his parents were infected.

“I bought an oximeter from Delhi before boarding a flight,” he told me later. “My mother’s condition was critical and needed immediate hospitalization, while my father was still doing well. I decided to shift my mother to Patna city the same night.”

For over eight hours, he roamed the city, the capital of Bihar state in northeastern India, using all social media platforms and his network with only one aim: finding a hospital bed for his mother. After a long struggle, he managed to get one bed at a private hospital for his mother — but, as he told me later, care for his mother was subpar. “The nurses would miss giving critical medications on time.”