Last standing: Covid-19 pandemic pushes Indian hospital to the brink

Guards armed with rifles escort Dr. Kumar Gaurav as he walks around his on the banks of the Ganges.

The guards are there to protect him from patients’ relatives, adding those suffering from Covid-19.Relatives continue to break into the rooms, even in extensive care, to caress and feed their enjoyments, without dressing even the most fragile.mask as barriers to the new coronavirus.

“If we warn them, they get angry,” he says. They need to give home-cooked food to their patients, and some even need to massage them.And they transmit the infections of our extensive care teams to other people” in society.

She stops to tell a patient’s wife in the ICU that she has to leave, she obeys and returns within minutes of the entrance.

It’s monsoon season and humidity reaches unbearable levels, but the hospital’s few air conditioners don’t paint and some parents use hand fans to keep those who enjoy them cool in filthy rooms with trash and discarded protective appliances.

It wasn’t meant to be that way for Kumar.

Nine years ago, the 42-year-old psychiatrist moved his family circle to his hometown in search of a quieter life and better pay after spending 3 years in the Indian capital, New Delhi, accepted a position as a medical professor and representative psychiatrist.at the 900-bed Jawahar Lal Nehru Hospital and Medical School, named after India’s prime minister.A life without stories but rewarding, he went on to teach and scale in his psychiatric patients.

Now, with some doctors affected by coronavirus and others refusing to work, he has been appointed senior hospital official, is one of his top junior experts and suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure, both threat points to severe Covid-19.

But he says he felt compelled to volunteer to work.

“Many of my colleagues refused, ” he said. I had to take responsibility.”

In April, when the pandemic struck here in eastern Bihar, the hospital was selected as one of four hospitals committed to Covid for a population of one hundred million more people, at least in theory.

In practice, Kumar says the nearest hospital with the right extensive care services is about two hundred kilometers (120 miles). And with proper fitness care in the hard-to-find surrounding rural areas, patients generally have nowhere to go through their hospital.

In June, Kumar said, the district administration asked the hospital to treat unedified patients as well.

“In an ideal world, there are no non-Covid patients in this hospital,” Kumar says.

Bhagalpur’s fitness system, like many other parts of Bihar, is on the brink of collapse, he said.

Interviews with dozens of staff members, patients and family members at the hospital paint an image of situations that may surprise other people accustomed to photographing the pandemic in the hermetically sealed ICU, as relatives can’t even touch their dying beings.

They report chronic shortages of labor and resources such as blood and medicine.The 37 beds in the extensive care unit are occupied; on the floor next to one of the beds, a relative sits on a brightly colored blanket he brought home, with a bottle of water on his side.

Kumar says he feels powerless to save him from Covid’s patients.

“We don’t know who’s positive and who’s negative,” the psychiatrist says.”We don’t know their prestige and we can’t wait for them to get tested.They just want the treatment. We are the most vulnerable population.”

Spokesmen for the Indian federal government and bihar government, as well as several bureaucrats and ministers guilty of physical care at the federal and state levels, responded to detailed requests for comment.Pranav Kumar, the senior official in Bhagalpur district, also responded.to a request for comment.

PROBLEM STATE

While infections are slowing down in many other countries, India continues to report more than 50,000 cases per day. Its total of more than 2 million cases follows only the United States and Brazil, and the cases show no signs of slowing down. India, more than 46,000 people have died.

Although major Indian cities, such as New Delhi and Mumbai, the first hit by the virus, have noticed a decrease in the number of cases, numbers in second-tier cities and rural areas continue to rise.

Bihar is India’s third most populous state; if it were a country, it would be the fourteenth most populous country in the world.

The state has a history, adding the site where the Buddha would have attained enlightenment under the shadow of a Bodhi tree.

But today, Bihar has as one of India’s troubled states.

Based on signs such as child nutrition, Bihar’s progression point has more in sub-Saharan Africa than in the disgustingly rich southern states of India.Almost a portion of children under the age of five in the state are malnourished, with more than 4 in 10 below the normal weight for their age , according to federal data.

Bihar also has population expansion in India and one of the worst school systems, with scores deficient in signs such as adult literacy, percentage of young people in school, and test scores.

The formula of physical care was overloaded even before it hit the pandemic.Sunil Kumar, Bihar secretary of the Indian Medical Association, India’s leading fitness union, said more than part of the state’s medical positions were vacant, because many doctors do not need to work in rural areas, according to Bihar’s highest.court, which suggested the state government do more to cover the roles in a ruling in May.

There have been about 87,000 cases shown of coronavirus in the state and 465 deaths, few compared to other states.Given the low degrees of control in the state, the numbers can be conservative.However, Bihar’s fitness formula is already close to the breaking point, unlike put as New Delhi, which has had many more cases but has greater resources.

The state government’s reaction to the outbreak has provoked public interest demands calling on India’s federal government, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to take control of the pandemic here.

One case, presented through local businessman Aditya Jalan, says “untold” lives will be lost if action is taken quickly, especially with the spread of the pandemic in less evolved and more rural areas.

His petition cites a “total collapse of public fitness infrastructure in Bihar state, adding the lack of Covid-19 hospitals, lack of hospital beds, inadequate testing, unhealthy quarantine centres, lack of application of social estating measures.[and] lack of PPE supply to frontline workers”.

The Supreme Court of India is scheduled to hear the case Friday.

State physical fitness disorders are acute in rural Bihar, where government infrastructure is even more rudimentary.In Ismailpur, a village an hour’s drive from Bhagalpur, the annual continuing floods cut off the main road leading to the highway.Number one fitness center in ruins, serving more than 52,000 people.

There are no beds or oxygen bottles, and a dog and its disorder rest on PPE equipment lying in the corner of the coronavirus room.

“It’s a long-overdue area,” says one of the center’s two doctors, Dr. Rakesh Ranjan.”People are even afraid to get tested. Sometimes we have to ask the police to get other people tested.”

HOSPITAL CHAOS

Psychiatrist Kumar’s hospital is subsidized through the Ganges, India’s holiest and swollen by the summer monsoon.In the look of water buffaloes bathing on the banks, personal paramedics wash their cars with broken buckets.

On the way to the hospital, there is a huge bump and the cars that take patients are blocked there. Outside the front doors, family members sit with the bodies of their loved ones while waiting for personal ambulances to take them to the funeral or cremation.

Workers who push trolleys with patients entering general emergency departments do not know the history of newcomers, most of whom have not yet been screened for the virus.Often, dressed only in gloves as protective equipment, staff take them inside, take their oxygen grades.and leave them in carts in the hallway, where other people are treated until they can find a bed.

In the hallway, an exhausted man rests her head on a wall while taking her husband’s blood pattern while he is a liar on a stretcher next to her.Inside one of the emergency departments, she drags her husband from a stretcher to his bed while her relative holds an intravenous bottle.

Kumar tries to be visible, visiting the rooms to motivate patients and staff, but it is a consistent intellectual mathematical game.Patients expect to be noticed by an experienced physician, but this is not possible.

“If I stand in front of a Covid patient for two minutes and see 20 patients, I’m exposed for 40 minutes,” he says.

With so few doctors, this type of exposure is a threat that cannot be allowed.

Complaints from beginner doctors are constant. In an assembly on the lack of drugs, Kumar promised them that he would convince them that more resources were needed, but then admits that it will be difficult.

Kumar cries as she describes her worst time since taking office, when a friend of her father’s, who wanted normal blood transfusions, asked for help.

“I had to say no because we don’t have enough blood in the bank.We only have a minimum for emergencies,” he said. He discovers those painful rejections: “I don’t know how to say no to a patient.”

GO HOME

Born in Bhagalpur, Kumar moved to the northern city of Chandigarh for medical training, where he met his wife, Mili Jaswal, a psychologist.

After their marriage, the couple moved to New Delhi, where they followed a stray dog, Faith.

Kumar worked in a personal hospital, but he may only handle the culture.

“Your thing is how much you can pay them back financially,” he says.”It’s hard for a doctor to paint [like that].”

And so, in 2011, Kumar, Mili and Faith tackled a back to Bihar.

“Financial security is a vital factor, and I had my circle of relatives here,” Says Kumar.

Her 6-year-old daughter, Iti Swara, was born a few years later and loves her.

Recently, he had his interior and exterior of his two-room government bungalow painted pink at his request, but in those days, the hugs he gives his daughter every morning before going to paint have changed.Now he has concern in mind, not love.

Mili fears that Kumar’s long hours of work and pictorial tension will take her away from her daughter.

“When he’s home, she needs to communicate with him, but he can’t, ” he said.”He needs to divide his mind and play with him, but he can’t.”

Kumar saw cases in the district build up slowly for several months, but the call to take control of the hospital last month came suddenly.The former director of the hospital had tested positive for the virus and, to Kumar’s surprise, said some of the most experienced doctors had turned down the job.Attempts to download the doctors’ comments failed, but the hospital’s lower-ranking doctors showed Kumar’s version, and an official letter from the former director cited one of the negatives.

He had an idea of his extended family, which he stopped visiting as the virus began to spread through the neighborhood.Who would take the hospital if they were admitted, if not him?

“For the other people in Bhagalpur and the neighboring districts, it’s my responsibility,” he says, “that’s why I raised my hand.”

A PATIENT WAITS

Fear of the virus, and anger at lack of resources, haunts patients and their loved ones.

One Sunday in July, Parsada Sah, a 67-year-old merchant, had the coronavirus test in a village 50 kilometres from Bhagalpur, and arrived at the hospital by ambulance along with his wife, Vimla Devi, and his son Manoj.Late.

Manoj showed his father’s positive check to the on-call doctor, who says they told him there were no beds in COVID and asked him to place a bed in a general 20-bed emergency room that was already overstretched.

“We’ve been told it’s the only position we can have right now, because there’s no room,” Manoj says.”We beg you very much. They told me everyone was looking for a bed.

Even though they know he’s infected, the family circle enters the room to feed Sah.

“The staff simply put the food to bed; don’t feed anyone, ” says Manoj.”If the patient can’t eat on their own, they should come and help.”

Kumar says his considerations are sincere.

“We don’t have separately to take patients to the bathroom or feed them,” he says.”The challenge is that we don’t have enough human resources, from top to bottom.”

TRANSPORT WEIGHT

Finally, almost a day later, a bed for Sah is discovered in isolation.When he is transferred, Sameer, a 22-year-old doctor who lends a hand sent to assist in the transfer, puts on his plastic suit.sunglasses, wear a reasonable pair of sunglasses.

He’s waving to his suit.

“We get them when we move HIV patients from the general department to a COVID room.”Otherwise, he says, “we’re the first to get a patient when he comes in, but we don’t have protection.”

After recovering an oxygen tank to move it and play with the bottle for a few minutes of service, Sameer and his colleague notice that it is defective, they take a new one, but the rusty cart in which they mount it moves slightly.the men retreat to drag him down the corridors of the hospital.

The stump tube of Sah’s oxygen mask as Sameer tries to maintain speed with the stretcher, with the man’s wife and the son’s mendacity behind.

Finally, the wheels of the carriage prevent it from spinning completely, so Sameer loads the large box over his shoulders and supports the weight himself.

“item.title”

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *