Recently, equal rights activist Harish Iyer stumbled on a post on Twitter from a woman who claimed she was looking for a home for two children who’d lost their parents to Covid-19. “Everyone’s instant reaction was to share it. It had over 2k retweets.” The kids were supposedly six months and two days old respectively. “This meant they obviously had different sets of parents. Somehow, I felt that the possibility of this woman encountering two orphans at the same place seemed a bit stretched. This could have been child trafficking for all you know.” To his horror, when Iyer called up the given number, it wasn’t functional, which prompted him to inform the police. 

As the pandemic continues in the country, stories of children losing both biological parents to the disease aren’t rare. Last week, two girls, aged six and eight, were orphaned after their parents and grandparents succumbed to Covid-19 in a span of 12 days, in Ghaziabad.