New Delhi (National Geographic)--- During the past few weeks, Indian social media has been inundated with SOS messages: hospitals tweeting about dwindling oxygen supplies and physicians watching helplessly as patients perish from preventable deaths. A journalist pleading for but denied a hospital bed took to Twitter to log his deteriorating condition till he died.
Overwhelmed crematoria are workinground-the-clock to keep up with the pace of bodies; furnaces have melted down from overuse and additional funeral platforms are being built outside. Such are the heartbreaking messages and haunting images that highlight the formidable second wave of the coronavirus pandemic raging through the country.
LOS ANGELES — Three days after being released from Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, Gilbert Torres returned on a stretcher, a clear tube snaking from his nose to an oxygen tank. It was the last place he wanted to be.
But Mr. Torres, 30, who had just spent two weeks on a ventilator in the intensive care unit, wasn’t there because his condition had worsened. He was there to visit a new outpatient clinic for Covid-19 survivors, intended to address their lingering physical and psychic wounds — and to help keep them from needing to be readmitted.
