COVID brought two kinds of people out. Those who wanted to help others in whichever way possible and those who wanted to make use of this a business opportunity to earn more. Black markets opened up for masks, gloves and sanitizers. For things where there is no MRP, prices sky rocketed for a while before supply caught on. I thought it was only small businesses who were trying to make quick money on this but it was there for a lot of big businesses and unicorns who jumped on this wave.

For example, I had seen status messages of people exchanging their points for donating oxygen facilitated by a fintech. This fintech was making people put up in their statuses for donating tens of thousand of liters of oxygen for their accumulated points, which made people very happy and give the company a much needed free promotion. But on a simple fact finding they are not giving out liquid oxygen but they were giving out numbers in regular atmospheric pressure.

A simple misinformation and not telling all the facts just drove people to freely promote the company. Oxygen is not at all costly, 20+% of atmosphere is oxygen, if you reverse the process of nitrogen concentrators that are used for filling car tyres you get 99% oxygen. For the record, a kilogram of LPG will not cost more than 60 rupees. A kilogram of oxygen is roughly 700 litres and that is barely enough for an hour for a covid patient, 1 litre of liquid oxygen will expand to around 860 litres of breathable oxygen. Government recently capped prices for refilling liquid oxygen at 25.71 rupees + GST per Cubic metre (1000 litres of liquid oxygen) which is around 86000 litres of breathable oxygen.

I have seen people putting up status messages on linkedin and whatsapp saying they donated 100,000 litres of oxygen and they feel proud about it, you are misled. You ended up donating about 40 rupees. There are more companies who are trying to ride the wave, we may not even be able to notice and will fall for their marketing skills.

It is the work of the majority of the good hearted people that still keeps us going. Do not get carried away with the marketing, help for the right set of people.