The COVID-19 pandemic and its multiple waves saw journalists breaking traditional norms and forms of reportage. They witnessed lakhs of migrants struggling to walk their way home, hospitals flooded with patients and overwhelmed by the lack of basic medical infrastructure like oxygen. Barkha Dutt talks to Mitali Mukherjee about her book To Hell and Back: Humans of COVID where she details what she saw and absorbed over the past two years. The book is a collection of essays on her long and emotionally wrought road trips covering the spread and devastation of the pandemic.

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