Turning the COVID-19 tide in Chennai

With an exponential rise in infections, Chennai quickly became a COVID-19 hotspot during the second wave. Serena Josephine M. reports on how the situation was stabilised before it could spiral out of control

With the phones ringing off the hook and the queues of the sick becoming longer, S. Sangavi and S. Ramachandran knew better than to put their tired feet up. In their 12-hour shifts, the duo — an emergency medical technician and an ambulance pilot attached to the 108 ambulance network — took on multiple trips in Chennai, ferrying at least 10 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 to nearby government hospitals each day. Though both Sangavi and Ramachandran, staff of the Vadapalani Depot ambulance, have been handling COVID-19 patients from the start of the pandemic, they soon realised that the unrelenting second wave of infections was unlike the first. With each passing day, they slowly got accustomed to outside government hospitals, hoping fervently that the patient on board would get a bed. “It took us at least an hour or two to get a patient into the hospital ward. It became extremely difficult to get an oxygen-supported bed in the last two months,” Sangavi says. At times, their shift extended to as long as 15 hours. “There was no time to eat,” Ramachandran says.