'So many people dying': China reports 37 million Covid cases in a day; Crisis worsens

As China grapples with its first-ever national COVID wave, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of Beijing are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, relatives of sick people are searching for open beds, and patients are slumped on benches in hospital corridors and lying on floors for a lack of beds.

This picture shows Covid-19 patients on stretchers in the emergency ward of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University in China's southwestern city of Chongqing. (Photo | AFP)