After testing positive for Covid, Aaj Tak journalist Rohit Sardana passes away

Senior journalist Rohit Sardana passed away today, according to journalists who shared the news on Twitter.

The Aaj Tak anchor had tweeted that he had tested positive for Covid on April 24.

Zee News chief Sudhir Chaudhary tweeted about Sardana's death, writing that he had not imagined that the virus would take away someone close to him. Sardana had worked for Zee News until 2017 when he joined Aaj Tak.

India Today's Rajdeep Sardesai tweeted that Sardana had suffered a heart attack earlier today.

The Press Club of India also expressed its shock at Sardana's death.

Aaj Tak confirmed the news on its broadcast with its anchor breaking down on air. The channel's Chitra Tripathi read out Sardana's tweets from the last few weeks where he had helped people looking for help, she said. He was very young and had two young daughters, she added, saying "it's unbelievable that he was unable to fight this."

Journalists Anjana Om Kashyap and Sayeed Ansari also joined the broadcast by telephone. Kashyap talked about meeting Sardana 20 years ago at Zee News and said she is "broken" at the thought of his daughters.

India has lost dozens of journalists to Covid and related issues in the past year. The Network of Women in Media, India, is maintaining a record of the names of all these journalists. "We mourn the loss of what they knew, what they loved, what each of them did, one story at a time, one photo at a time, one dataset at a time," the organisation stated in a post. See the full list here.