With everything else being analyzed through the lens of the pandemic, it is important to examine the COVID-19 pandemic itself and put it in conversation with the local public health discourse of a place. In this work, I reflect on my struggles to focus on a local public health concern while a global one grabbed headlines. Though my ethnographic fieldwork, exploring Delhi’s struggle to contain the dengue outbreak, always took place under the shadow of several viral outbreaks such as H1N1, NIPAH, and ZIKA, my informants, including doctors, frontline health workers, and epidemiologists, remained resolutely focused on local priorities such as mosquito-borne infections. Consequently, so did I. Then, COVID-19 emerged, and just like my informants, I found myself at the local frontline of a global struggle that neither of us was prepared for. How futile (or fruitful) is it to work on a local and recurrent public health concern, such as dengue in Delhi, in the time of a novel virus potentially causing global disruption? What should be my ethnographic focus as these two diseases take turns being policy priorities? What research strategies should I adopt to make the international and local reconcile? The essay will analyze these questions in light of my field engagement with a local public health priority while the pandemic raged. Broadly, this work, stitching together my ethnographic fieldwork in the light of the pandemic, argues that in order to make sense of an emergent moment, it must be put in the context of the present and the past. Hence, this work analyses the pandemic in the context of the existing public health discourse in India.