Bijnor: In the emergency room of a public hospital in northern India, a man was trying to revive his mother who had just died from Covid-19-like symptoms.
On another bed, a young man who had tested positive was sitting up and making an effort to breathe while two members of his exhausted family were sprawled on the tiny bed.
The one doctor on duty in the ER in this hospital in Bijnor, a town in India’s most populous Uttar Pradesh state, 180 km east of Delhi, can barely attend to the stream of patients that are coming in, in rickety ambulances or in the back of cars.
India’s brutal second wave has reached the small towns and the countryside, ripping through a fragile health system not equipped to deal with such a large public health crisis.
Doctors are hard to come by, intensive care units are expensive and scarce, and patients are packing into emergency rooms. People flit in and out, trying to help with everything from procuring oxygen cylinders to artificial resuscitation. The Express Tribune
