Overworked medical professionals and paramedics across the country are bearing the brunt of Covid-19 as they wage frontline battle against the deadly virus.
According to sources in the Government, around 50 members of medical staff, including doctors, nurse and paramedics, across the country have tested positive for coronavirus.
Some had contracted the virus while treating the patients, a few of them had travelled abroad where they got the disease.
“The infected medical staff have been isolated and getting requisite treatment,” said the sources while raising concern that, “If the doctors are going to fall sick, the entire effort of preventing spreading of COVID-19 will fail in the country.”
On Thursday, a resident doctor from AIIMS, Delhi tested positive for the disease, said sources in the hospital.
Though the source of his infection is not yet known, the doctor does not have any foreign travel history. The medic from the Physiology Department is the seventh doctor in Delhi to get COVID-19.
Just a day ago, two resident doctors of Safdarjung Hospital in the national Capital tested positive for COVID-19.
One of them, who is part of the team treating COVID-19 patients at the hospital, is believed to have contracted the disease during the course of duty. The female resident doctor, a third-year post-graduate student of the biochemistry department, who has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, had recently travelled abroad.
Doctors at Safdarjung Hospital also questioned the Government’s move to set up the Covid-19 ward within the premises of the hospital itself.
“Other patients are also coming at the emergency, leaving them exposed to those having Covid-19,” a doctors said on the condition of anonymity.
In Jammu & Kashmir, two doctors have been put under home quarantine.
It adds to the worries when healthcare professionals including doctors catch the virus while performing their duties, said Dr GS Grewal, former Punjab Medical Council President.
In Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow too, a 25-year-old junior resident doctor tested positive for Covid-19. In Rajasthan, too, a doctor at a private hospital tested positive for the virus. In Kerala, 25 doctors were quarantined after one of their colleagues tested positive.
The Covid-19 is showing no sign of decline, posing an unprecedented medical challenge for the health workers - that of keeping the patients infection free - and struggling with traditionally and limited personnel protection equipments such as masks, PPEs, sanitisers and gloves.
There has been numerous complaints of the shortage as well the poor quality of the medical gear being made available to the doctors in some States.
A doctor said that personal protection equipment (PPE) was indispensable when isolation wards are activated with COVID-19 positive cases.
“We need to have double protection all over the body. Hands should have double gloves and eyes with goggles. “A protective shield is must to cover the portion between neck and shoulder which is available with PPE. We need at least five PPEs a day at every isolation ward,” he said.
There have been reports of doctors and health workers in Kolkata being forced to use raincoats in the absence of protective gowns, gloves. Doctors from across the country had a few days ago had taken to social media to highlight the lack of protective gear such as masks, overalls.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) had early last month highlighted the growing shortage of PPEs across the world, which it said endangered doctors and frontline healthcare workers. It has asked the Governments to step up the manufacturing of essential gear.