Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has to not only take care of the state’s response to the outbreak of coronavirus within the state, but attend to distress calls from Malayalees from all over the world, including those facing desperate situations in different states within the country.
His office is besieged with SOS messages from Malayalee health workers in places like Delhi and Mumbai, where a number of nurses have tested positive for the disease but are not getting the required care by negligent hospital managements.
Each and every case is attended to, with the Chief Minister himself or his staff coordinating the efforts with the embassies and the External Affairs Ministry if it is an overseas case or the State authorities when the problem is within India.
The Chief Minister has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal seeking their help in bringing relief to the affected people in the wake of a video going viral on social media where a coronavirus-affected nurse seeks help with her pathetic state of affairs.
The video has one of the affected nurses in the Delhi Cancer Institute, complaining about her plight of having to live with her two children aged eight and four years though the boys are not carrying the virus.
She says that the institute has failed to provide any treatment to the affected nurses, leaving them to take care of themselves. She was not even provided with an ambulance to go to the hospital, forcing her to arrange for a private vehicle to take her, along with the two children.
Another colleague of hers had to organise the coronavirus test by herself as the hospital management refused to do one.
Similar stories of neglect have emerged from hospitals in other parts of the country as well. More than 40 nurses from Kerala who work in Wockhardt hospital in Mumbai have tested positive for coronavirus, but some of them complained that they were still being asked to turn up for duty.
The nurses have also complained that they have not been provided proper protective gear, which explains how so many of them contracted the disease.
The Chief Minister’s office is getting a number of calls from Keralites working in the Arabian countries, seeking help to return to the state as the situation in the Gulf countries is becoming worse by the day. Many people have lost their jobs, but are stranded as there are no flights to India. They are all waiting for the lockout to be lifted so that air traffic can resume.
The large number of possible returnees would put further pressure on the state’s defence protocol against the deadly virus, which though overstretched has produced exemplary results. Despite the fact that it was Kerala where the first cases of coronavirus were detected, the state has the lowest mortality rate relating to the disease and has managed to contain its spread.
States like Tami Nadu and Maharashtra, which reported their first cases much later, are now way ahead in terms of the number of patients as well as deaths. But in terms of the number of tests conducted on vulnerable people and the number of isolations, the state ranks very high, which explains the success of the containment policy.
