In the emergency room of a public hospital in northern India on Tuesday, 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 New Delhi, can barely attend to the stream of patients that are coming in, in rickety ambulances or in the back of cars.