“We were all really scared,” said Jeenam Shah, a pulmonologist, of the time his first Covid-19 patient arrived at South Mumbai’s Wockhardt Hospital, on March 24. “This was the first case. No one [knew] what [was] going to happen, including me,” Shah told IndiaSpend, “We were all scared about how to deal with this.” With no cure available yet for the highly infectious disease and a vaccine that is at least 12-19 months away, frontline healthcare staff are working without established treatment protocols, unlike for most other diseases. They must rely on the general guidelines offered by health and research bodies, and feedback from each other.

Covid-19: Indian doctors are relying on trial-and-error methods without a vaccine or proven cure