Straining against his weight, Shayam Narayan’s brothers haul him from a rickshaw onto a hospital trolley in India’s capital New Delhi.
Only a few minutes pass before they are given the news: he is already dead.
Narayan is one of the latest casualties of a second wave of the coronavirus sweeping across India. His brothers had first brought him to the hospital at 6 a.m. on Friday. But they said staff deemed him well enough to return home.
Ten hours later, his condition deteriorating, they came back. But it was too late to save him.
“The system is broken,” his younger brother Raj said.
Narayan, who had five children, died without being admitted to the hospital, or taken to its morgue, meaning his death is unlikely to be officially counted in the city’s rising toll.
