India reported a record breaking 388,452 new cases and 3,498 deaths Friday, as the national health system remains crippled by the lack of oxygen supplies and available beds.
More than 40 countries around the world have promised aid.
"The United States is delivering supplies worth more than $100 million in the coming days to provide urgent relief to our partners in India," State Department representative Ned Price said Thursday.
A vaccine shortage has also forced inoculation centers in the India financial hub of Mumbai closed their doors for three days Friday.
As another COVID wave washes over India leaving thousands dead each day, authorities have deployed resources to combat a different problem: mounting criticism on social media of the government's inadequate pandemic policies.
New regulations passed in February allow the India government to delete content almost at will on the world's biggest social media sites.
But authorities only recently started to exercise this power when they took down roughly 50 posts, including one tweet dating to April 12 posted by Pawan Khera, representative for India's main opposition political party.
In it, Khera comments on how one of the largest Hindu annual religious ceremonies in which millions of people bath together in a river was allowed to take place in early April in the midst of a pandemic.
"Why was my tweet withheld?" Khera told BuzzFeed News. "That's the answer I need from the government of India."
"The government welcomes criticisms, genuine requests for help as well as suggestions in the collective fight against COVID-19," India's ministry of electronics and IT said in a statement over the weekend.
"But it is necessary to take action against those users who are misusing social media during this grave humanitarian crisis for unethical purposes," the note continued.
This is not the first time the Modi administration has asked social media companies to take down critical posts. In February, micro blogging website Twitter took down pandemic-related posts at the request of the Indian government.
The people behind the offending tweets included journalists, filmmakers, an actor, a state minister and several members of the political opposition as well as members of the public.
"India's current internet censorship ties directly into social criticism of the government's policies," Apar Gupta, director of digital rights organization Internet Freedom Foundation, told BuzzFeed News.
