India COVID crisis: Tragic scenes at a hospital in Uttar Pradesh

While the situation in Delhi has improved, smaller towns like Bijnor are struggling.

In the emergency room of a public hospital in northern India, a man is trying to revive his mother who had just died from COVID-19 symptoms. On another bed, a young man who had tested positive is sitting up and making an effort to breathe while two members of his exhausted family sprawl on the tiny bed. The one doctor on duty in the ER in this hospital in Bijnor, a small town in India’s most populous Uttar Pradesh state 180km (112 miles) east of Delhi, can barely attend to the stream of patients that are coming in, in rickety ambulances or in the backs of cars.