Mukul Garg wasn’t too worried when his 57-year-old uncle developed a fever on 24 April. Then, within 48 hours, two others in his family of 17 also became ill.

The symptoms trickled in as expected - temperatures spiked and voices grew hoarse with coughing.

Mr Garg initially chalked it up to seasonal flu, unwilling to admit it could be coronavirus.

“Five or six people often fall sick together in this house, let’s not panic,” he told himself.

Over the next few days, five more people in the house showed Covid-19 symptoms. And the pit in his stomach grew.

Soon, the Garg family would become its own coronavirus cluster as 11 of its 17 members tested positive.

“We met nobody from the outside and no-one entered our house. But even then the coronavirus entered our home, and infected one member after the other,” Mr Garg would later write in his blog, which has since attracted hundreds of comments from readers.

The exhaustive account shows how the multi-generational family, a mainstay of Indian life, poses a unique challenge in the fight against Covid-19.