With no intensive care available in remote areas, many patients died on their way to city hospitals. Now rural medics are using tele-ICU systems to save lives • Photographs by Elke Scholiers for the Guardian Whenever an ambulance arrived with a critically ill patient, Dr R Mubarak’s heart would sink. His small country hospital in Bagepalli, like most rural government hospitals in India, had no intensive-care unit. Families had to take the patient, who was perhaps on the brink of death, on a two-hour drive to the general hospital in Bengaluru. “Often the patient came back in the same ambulance, dead. They never made it,” says Mubarak. “I knew I could be signing their death warrant by sending them but I had no choice.” Continue reading...

Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today The Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he regrets bowing to what he claims was pressure from the US government to censor posts about Covid on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic. Zuckerberg said senior White House officials in Joe Biden’s administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor certain Covid-19 content” during the pandemic. Continue reading...