Thread by @Reuters

Rohan Aggarwal is 26 years old.

He doesn’t even complete his medical training until next year.

And yet he is the doctor who must decide who will live and who will die when patients come to him gasping for breath, their family members begging for mercy reut.rs/3unECrr

As India’s healthcare system teeters on the verge of collapse during a brutal second wave of COVID-19, Aggarwal makes those decisions during a 27-hour workday that includes a grim overnight shift in charge of the emergency room at his New Delhi hospital

Everyone at Holy Family Hospital – patients, relatives and staff – knows there aren’t enough beds, not enough oxygen or ventilators to keep everyone who arrives at the hospital’s front gates alive.

'Who to be saved, who not to be saved should be decided by God,' Aggarwal says

India has reported a global record of more than 300,000 daily cases for the last two weeks – figures experts say are almost certainly conservative.

Crematoriums work round the clock, throwing up plumes of smoke as the bodies of victims arrive every few minutes

In the capital, fewer than 20 of more than 5,000 COVID-19 ICU beds are free at any one time.

Patients rush from hospital to hospital, dying on the street or at home, while oxygen trucks move under armed guard to facilities with perilously low stocks

Read more about the doctor who decides who lives and who dies as COVID-19 ravages India reut.rs/3unECrr by @dansiddiqu @AlasdairPal