Scores die waiting at hospital doorsteps in COVID-ravaged India

Dozens of people piled outside of the largest COVID-19 hospital in India’s capital city, gasping for breath. Health-care workers performed CPR on dying patients who had been denied admission to the overcrowded facility. The majority of them never make it inside. After seeing his son struggling to breathe last Sunday, Kamre Aalam rushed to the Lok Nayak Jan Prakash (LNJP) hospital. But with India facing an unprecedented second wave of the novel coronavirus, all 1,500 beds at LNJP were occupied. Many of the patients who waited outside the hospital doors last week took their last breaths there. After waiting for hours, Rayees Aalam, Aalam’s 26-year-old son, died there too. Dazed, Aalam sat by his son—who was wrapped in a blue disposable plastic bag—inside an ambulance that drove towards the largest cemetery in New Delhi, two miles away from the hospital.