When calls go much beyond Covid in this control room
It’s 11 am and Anjana Sharma has already been on the landline phone at her desk for four hours nonstop. Sharma, 35, walks into this unsung Covid control room at 7 am sharp everyday, after a hurried breakfast and a long car pool. From there on, she attends anything from 50 to 70 plus calls from those in distress, till her shift gets over at 1 pm. Her five other colleagues, all of them public health nursing officers, too, follow this drill in a 12X10 ft room at the sanitizer-drenched entrance of the Delhi government’s Directorate of Health Services headquarters, close to the Karkardooma Courts. A second control room, also on the ground floor and disinfected routinely, offers a similar scene with five to six officers talking incessantly on 10 MTNL numbers and noting down details in diaries and registers. This goes on day and night through three shifts.
As Anita Panwar, a team leader at the centre, pointed out, “The phones haven’t stopped ringing here for more than two months now.’’ While the night shift used to be relatively lighter during the early days when coronavirus was just starting to be a household name, the month of May has been equally busy through day and night as cases rise speedily and so do anxious queries ranging from Covid symptoms to train bookings to hospital admission. The centre is meant to address Covid–related cases falling under the Delhi districts , but it has ended up taking calls from people much farther — in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana.
The queries too have gone much beyond the core health issues. A caller from Bhutan — with his story of employers not paying the dues to a group of Indian workers — had recently surprised the staff at the control centre, which had to work the diplomatic channels to resolve a complex labour issue in another country, according to Dr B S Charan, who heads the Covid Control Room at the DHS headquarters.
The numbers tell a story: From March 25, when the control centre got formalised to May 28, as many as 66,563 calls have been received here, and by end of this month the numbers could well surpass 70,000. For the seven days in March, there were 6,185 calls, rising to 27,101 in April and the number could get close to 40,000 in May.
Till May 28, there have been 33,277 calls already.
While in April, Delhi saw 14 Covid deaths, the toll was at 68 in May till Wednesday. On May 27, the city state had to face the highest number of deaths from the virus so far at 13.
The brief to staff here was they had to guide callers with information on lab test procedures, hospital network, symptoms for the disease, quarantine protocol among the various Covidlinked matters. But, as Panwar said, “we try to provide help whatever way we can even if the subject is not directly related to the disease.” The long hours of calls, mostly without break, result in stress for those who are here to resolve others’ problems. ‘’We counsel each other after the shift gets over,’’ Panwar added laughing out her stress.
Recently, Sandhya Singh, 45, broke down while speaking to a migrant, Raju, on the phone. Singh could not cope with the pain that Raju narrated while he was trying to reach his home in an UP village from Delhi. He had blisters in his feet and had not had a full meal for days. He had happened to see the Covid control room number on a billboard and dialled in with his query on the possibility of a bus or train connection. Singh took the call, cried loudly and then spent several hours after that, using her own internet connection and mobile phone, trying to find a solution for him.
Similarly, Anand Singhal, who’s mostly on the night shift, which women are not encouraged to be a part of because of the much longer hours, was able to help connect a resident of West Bengal--hit by the recent cyclone—with his family in Delhi. With no facility for outstation calls on the dedicated MTNL numbers, Singhal too used his own mobile phone to make several calls to people and authorities in West Bengal before resolving the matter though there was no Covid connect.
This is not the first time that a control room has been put in place here. Some years ago, when dengue had broken out in Delhi, the control room here had three dedicated MTNL lines. Now the number is up to 10, but there’s need for many more. Also, the staff here want technology and software for easy to access data to ease the load on the system, which is purely manual at present. Even to help families of patients with test reports takes long, one of the officers said. Nobody quite knows the reason for the delay.
With no meal or drink breaks at this Covid frontline, is there any recreation or leisure outside work? ‘’There’s no question of any leisure because most of us are working 24X7, even when the work hours have ended,’’ pointed out Dr Charan. Vacation is a dream too as there’s no visibility on when the Covid crisis would be over.