April-May were college admission months in Delhi. Unfortunately, they have become months to run to hospitals because of Covid-19.

People are rushing to hospitals for admissions, for themselves or their close ones. Lok Nayak, RML, Hindu Rao, Safdarjung, Ganga Ram or AIIMS — the list is long.

The rush is everywhere, whether they are run by municipal corporations, private sector or the central government.

Schools and colleges, like many other institutions, are approachable online.

The hospitals have to be searched on the ground.

The second wave of the pandemic has made the national capital, like the rest of the country, go round in circles. In spite of the flood of information on the web, or that circulated by the government on different media, people are running from one hospital to another for admissions.

There is no clarity. The information in circulation is not trustworthy, many have found. They want to personally check the facts

This is a question of life and death. Whether one has means or not, people are running from place to place. There are hospitals on the periphery of the capital. And many across, in the adjoining towns of Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Noida and Faridabad. All hospitals are being approached.

A place may not have a vacant bed. Another may not have a ventilator bed. Still another may not have oxygen. At many places, the staff have been telling visitors that until the beds are vacated for whatever reasons, the new patients have to wait in their ambulances.

There are reports of patients breathing their last in the ambulances. This was never expected in Delhi. The city has not seen a plague in living memory.

The wars had created an atmosphere of some fear and curfew-like conditions. Never was there scare that the hospitals would turn back patients from their doors. Once admitted, the patients or their relatives had never heard that oxygen was over, and they would have to arrange it themselves. Hospitals chiefs tweeted for help in getting oxygen supplies.

One of them could not control his tears, narrating the problem. People ran all over the city for Remdesivir. The Covid-19 is an unprecedented challenge. It has shaken the city’s faith in its institutions. If the disease was big, there were big institutions, top medical experts, all over the capital and around.

People met the high financial costs, but still lives could not be saved. The migrant workers left the city as they knew the city could not sustain them.

They had another place called home, to go. The mighty seat of power could not convince them of safe shelter or life support.

In this hour of fear and helplessness, they were not alone. Even those who called this city their home from ancestry, enjoyed no better sense of security.

The current crisis is like the spectre of death passing over the city, they know. There is little that human intervention can do in the circumstance, is the feeling. People have seen their relatives die in their presence.

In some cases, they did not have even this privilege; waiting outside hospitals for days, they were told their loved ones had died battling the disease.

The world thought the solution to all its problems lay in the cyber-space, and devoted all its energy expanding its horizons. A virus and its mutants have brought home a fact-check moment for most.

There were a few challenges still lurking in the physical environment.

They too wanted to be counted. The hospital system in Delhi is not just inadequate but sick too, people in Delhi said.

Ad hoc conversion of banquet halls or convention centres into treatment facilities cannot meet the challenge, which can grow in the subsequent phases of Covid-19.

Unscrupulous elements can be prevented from making profits from the scarcity of medicines and essential supplies, only if the medical infrastructure is enlarged several times. When the city is looked upon as a medical destination by people from all over the country, it needs to grow up accordingly.