‘Sari is my mask’: How the COVID pandemic has hit India’s poorest

Weakened by fever and gasping for breath, 47-year-old Vinod Kumar died in an ambulance more than 60km (35 miles) from his home in India’s eastern Bihar state, far from the big cities at the centre of the nation’s devastating COVID-19 crisis. His death last week followed a frantic journey and dozens of phone calls by desperate relatives in search of a hospital bed and oxygen supplies, as a nationwide surge in coronavirus cases exposes the limitations of health facilities in the countryside. “We admitted him wherever we found a bed. It was a nursing home but wasn’t functioning like one. Patients were getting their own oxygen,” said Kameshwar Kumar, Vinod’s brother. “The hospital was rationing its oxygen supply to patients and my brother was sinking so we were forced to rush him to another hospital but he didn’t make it,” Kumar told Reuters news agency by telephone, crying as he spoke.