COVID has affected everyone around the world. I want to talk about how it affected an international student studying remotely in India, which was the worst-hit country by COVID in the past few months.
It was not easy at all. Of course it was difficult not just for me but for all the citizens of my country. The situation was way worse and grave than what was reported in the international media.
I wouldn’t say it was just one party’s mistake, the government’s mistake, or the people’s mistake. Everybody had their fair share of contribution to the second wave of COVID-19, and of how the second wave affected the whole nation. It certainly got worse when all types of coloured fungus started affecting people post-recovery; I remember there were yellow, white, and black strains of the fungus at that time. Among other things, they made people lose their eyesight and damaged their lungs.
The second wave of COVID was, of course, inevitable. It was predicted that the second wave would hit India in November last year, and it took a bit longer, but it did hit us and it was really serious.
People were gasping for oxygen. People died not because of improper treatment but because they could not get a bed at the hospital. Oxygen scarcity made everyone panic: doctors, nurses, even the provincial ministers to the higher ups; everyone looked helpless.
Ambulance sirens were becoming a normal sound to my ears. The place I reside is basically a hill station and not heavily populated. I could still hear a lot of sirens throughout the night sometimes, as well as during the day. In the city it was the most serious, I suppose.
A lot of people around me were hospitalized and some passed away due to unavailability of oxygen in the hospital. The value of human life was reduced way beyond what it was before here.
Social media and news channels were all about how many deaths were occurring in a day and how much the social system had gone bad in the country. Burial grounds were overflowing. Dead bodies were floating in rivers and lakes because the relatives of the people who died couldn’t afford a burial ground or couldn’t even find a place for the bodies at all.
People were losing their cool; the situation really just got worse and worse. Now, just a month after the second wave, the situation is still not that good yet people have started to roam around without masks, travelling unnecessarily and visiting tourist spots like the virus doesn’t even exist anymore.
When the second wave hit everyone blamed everybody but they didn’t see what their own mistakes were. I didn’t have any classes this summer, especially when the situation in India was dire. I can’t even imagine how distracting it would have been for me if I had classes.
We were scared every day. If, by chance, we catch the virus, how on Earth will we ever get a bed in the hospital? We made sure not to leave our house much.
Everyone just wanted to get vaccinated in the hopes that it would save us from hospitalization, but, to our dismay, we were also facing severe vaccine shortages. The vaccination drive in India for people who are between 18 and 45 started in May, but after a few days they declared that those over 18 won’t be vaccinated due to vaccine shortages. But a month later now the situation has improved. The government has done their bit with vaccine distribution and cases have gone down a fair amount.
I hope that when the third wave hits, it won’t be as bad as the second wave was. The second wave should be a big lesson for India, and maybe even a big lesson for the rest of the world.