COVID-19 definitely surprised all the world by transforming from being a disease confined in a city to being a country epidemic; and finally getting a pandemic status. This new pandemic brought a myriad of challenges. Hospitals changed the way of working and adopted new strategies. They increased their bed strength, upgraded wards with ICU capabilities, postponed elective surgeries and gave new roles to healthcare providers. This all has impacted medical education and training, while there have been daily changes in the strategy to deal with the pandemic and also have been significant changes in the teaching practices. 1 A total halt of educational services in the phase of lockdown led to a new era of e-learning with the use of various internet meeting platforms. While these come with an advantage of easy availability and a wide reach, but there is a limit to how effective they can be in terms of imparting clinical knowledge. Surely, there can be vivid presentations addressing the theoretical part of the subject and 3-D animations on clinical examination with the help of newer pictographic tools available to us. But, can this replace the old school hands-on teaching? Will the newer generation of medical students be able to apply these virtually learned skills when it comes to actually dealing with the real human body? These are a few challenging questions that need to be answered as we adapt ourselves with these newer methods of teaching.

Initially, the students faced a great deal of uncertainty during the lockdown as to whether the classes are going to resume or not. Those students who were supposed to have their rotations suffered the most as all forms of patient contact was removed and most of them eventually received full credits for clinical rotations. This is concerning as to what will the students do when they will actually face a specific type of patient which they have never had a direct clinical contact with. There was no clear-cut information regarding the pattern and time of the examinations. Some lost the precious time of their training, while others missed the deadlines of their competitive entrance examinations. And to top all of that, residents had duties in the COVID wards, ICUs and screening centres. Being struck in a cycle of duties and self-quarantine with an added fear of contracting the disease, many residents suffered from depression and anxiety. Poor mental health certainly had a worse effect on the studies and training of such residents. 2