NEW DELHI—From 10 p.m. until midnight, Acquilin John in Mumbai, India, was desperately making phone calls, trying to find a hospital bed for a COVID-19 patient in distant Tamil Nadu she had never met. Eventually, the hospital staff stopped answering. “I don’t blame them really,” she said. “They must have been inundated with such calls. We tried our best to communicate; there was a huge language barrier too. But there weren’t any resources.”
John works as a digital growth strategist, but as the coronavirus crisis hit India, she, like thousands of others mostly in the urban middle class, started working with several informal networks that formed on social media in April to primarily help COVID-19 patients get essential medical resources like oxygen, plasma donations, medicine, and hospital beds.
