After a posting a desperate plea for ICU beds on Twitter an assistant professor has tragically died from Covid-19 just 10 days after her mother.
Nabila Sadiq, 38, succumbed to the deadly virus just a week after testing positive, 10 days after her mother Nuzhat, 76, also died from complications related the disease.
Her father was hospitalised for Covid but was eventually discharged and is under home quarantine.
In her last days, the gender studies scholar posted on Twitter in a desperate please for an ICU bed.
She asked people to “pray” for herself and her parents and expressed her fear that “no one will stay alive in Delhi”.
From April, she starting sharing a flood of exasperated tweets about the Covid crisis in India, writing on April 24: “Too young and known people dying due to lack of oxygen.
(Image: @SugarsNSpice/Twitter)
“Every day I wake up to a death news. Too much for the mental state. When will this end.”
On May 1, she penned: “Pray for me and parents please. We sail through.”
She then begged people to help her find a bed in an intensive care unit, soon after Indian hospitals were forced to turn patients away amid a spike in Covid cases.
She wrote on May 4: “Any ICU bed leads? For myself.”
Her last tweet, posted on the same day, simply read: “Got it.”
But this was her last tweet. Despite securing herself a hospital bed, after being turned away by three hospitals, Nabila’s lungs were already too damaged and she died on Monday night, NDTV reported.
While she was in Fortis Hospital in Faridabad, Nabila was also allegedly not told when her mother Nuzhat, who was also battling coronavirus, had died on May 7.
Students said Nabila was a caring teacher who loved writing poems, and discussing politics and gender theory.
Her students helped perform her mother’s last rites on May 7. Around the same time, Nabila’s health began to deteriorate rapidly.
Waqar, a friend and student from her university said they called “every hospital in Delhi to get her an oxygen bed”.
He explained: “Her friends helped us get a bed at Fortis Hospital in Faridabad. However, her oxygen levels dropped to 32 per cent.
“After a CT scan, the doctor said her lungs were damaged. I received hundreds of calls every day from her colleagues, relatives and friends asking about her health. We didn’t know what to do”.
“Every student who was pursuing gender studies wanted to do their PhD under her mentorship. She helped so many people during the pandemic.
“We would talk to her and tell her that her parents were missing her, hoping she would feel better and recover. But on Saturday night she was put on a ventilator.”
The Indian Express reported that Nabila’s doctors said she wasn’t responding to medicines and treatment. She died around 11pm on Monday.
On Tuesday, her students and friends performed her last rites at Mangolpuri, where her mother was buried ten days earlier.
Nabila’s father Sadique, 80, a retired professor who taught at Aligarh Muslim University said: “I think she loved her mother more and left with her, leaving me alone here.”
Nabila’s colleague and friend Tarannum Siddiqui said: “I have known Nabila and her family for seven years. They helped me last month when I had Covid.
“When Nabila was admitted to the ICU, I sent her messages on her phone. I knew she wasn’t reading them but I was waiting for her to recover, read those texts and meet me.
“She was an honest woman. We both taught gender studies. I can’t believe she has left me.”
It comes as the World Health Organisation reports 25,772,440 confirmed cases of coronavirus in India with 287,122 deaths.
As of May 4, a total of 175,171,482 vaccine doses have been administered in the country.