Amazon website says oxygen concentrator not essential item, puts spotlight on wonky algorithms in Covid times

E-commerce services like Amazon are having a hard time categorising items as essentials or not. Since only essential items are allowed in lockdown regions, people are not able to order some potentially life-saving items through the online portals.

As India goes through its most distressing phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, the focus for all the citizens and entities has changed radically towards putting an end to it. One such industry facing steep challenges is that of e-commerce, which now bears the burden of getting the “essentials” to the masses. But in these troubled times, it might become hard to point out what can be considered as essential and what not. Case in point, e-commerce majors like Amazon, are not able to clearly portray many essential items on their online portals. Some of these items include oxygen cylinders, oxygen concentrators and even oxygen masks. A quick search on Amazon for any of these items reveals a list of vendors that have the products in availability. Amazon users can easily order items such as oxygen cylinders, concentrators, masks and more. The problem arises for people in areas with a lockdown imposed to curb Covid-19 spread.