A Delhi family’s desperation: ‘We’re rationing dad’s oxygen’

With only one oxygen cylinder and no way to afford another, the family of a cancer patient with COVID must make hard choices, giving their father oxygen only when he is gasping for breath.

New Delhi, India – For the past two weeks, the Yeshudas family has been living in the throes of despair. Residents of Dilshad Colony, a lower-middle-class settlement in the northeast of the capital, New Delhi, all three family members are suffering severe COVID-19 symptoms – fever, nausea, breathlessness and vomiting. But they have not have been able to see a doctor as all of the nearby government hospitals “are choked with patients and have intimidatingly long queues outside,” explains 27-year-old Ajin Yeshudas. Private doctors are expensive and “well beyond our means”, he adds. Ajin, who lives with his parents and works as a quality analyst in a BPO (business processing outsourcing) centre, says he came down with COVID-19 symptoms on April 14. He wanted to get tested “but the nearby hospitals were all overflowing with patients, so I had to wait for a week to even contact a lab”.