#covidsos

India reported more than 300,000 coronavirus cases within 24 hours on Thursday, marking the world's highest daily tally and taking the country's total cases to nearly 16 million. Shortages of ambulances, hospital beds, drugs and oxygen supplies are crippling healthcare in much of the country of 1.3 billion, prompting people to post appeals on Twitter in a desperate bid to get help for seriously ill loved ones. People in need and those with information or resources are sharing telephone numbers of volunteers, vendors who have oxygen cylinders or drugs, and details of which medical facility can take patients using hashtags like #COVIDSOS. Many people are creating Twitter accounts to seek help from those in positions of power, officials manning helpline numbers said, but hundreds of millions of mainly poorer Indians do not have access to a smartphone or use social media. Among the more than 500 million Indians who do use smartphones, WhatsApp, YouTube and Facebook are among the most widely used platforms, according to government data. Twitter, which lawmakers, charities and political party helplines are using to share information and answer pleas for help, has only 17.5 million users in India, data shows. For the vast majority of Indians struggling to get help, repeatedly calling inundated phone lines or carrying patients to emergency wards in person is the only option - highlighting the impact of the country's digital divide.