Outside the gates of Lok Nayak hospital in Delhi, which has 1,500 Covid-19 beds which are all full, the ongoing desperation of the situation in the capital was visible. Ambulances with critical patients were repeatedly turned away because there was no room.

In one ambulance lay Hasima Begum, 60, gasping for air as her oxygen levels had crashed to a deadly 30%.

“We’ve been to four hospitals already this morning but nowhere has any beds,” said her 17-year-old grandson M D Kaif. “They say she’s got maybe 10 minutes to live if we can’t get her oxygen and a bed.”

But like all the other hospitals they had been to that morning, there was no room for Begum. As the family waited outside the gates, they were presented with a consent form to sign, stating that it was not the fault the ambulance or the hospital if Begun died without admission. “We are helpless, what can we do now?” said Kaif.

As soon as one ambulance left, three others turned up in their place, all with Covid-19 patients in severe distress. Sasi Devi, 47, lay on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. This was the sixth time her family had brought her here in the hope of admission.

“Give me poison, end this pain,” Devi rasped. But her son returned from the hospital gates, shaking his head. “No oxygen cylinder, no bed,” he said quietly. “So now we will take her home to die”.

Others waited for their dead to be returned. Priyanka Gupta, 29, sobbed as she said she had been waiting all day to reclaim the body of her mother, 57-year-old Rita Devi.

“Yesterday for six hours my mother was kept waiting outside this hospital but they would not let her in even when her oxygen fell to 19%,” said Gupta. “It was only when she was dead that they finally took her inside the hospital, and now I don’t know when I can get her body back.”