Covid-19 warriors battle soaring temperatures
CHANDIGARH: Many get dehydrated, some faint as the summer heat intensifies, but there’s no stopping Chandigarh’s healthcare workers. Clad in blue protective gear from head to toe, dripping with sweat, they remain undaunted, focused only on screening patients at the city’s hotspots, Bapu Dham and Sector 30.
Work hours stretch from 18 to 19 hours, and many have not taken a single day off or seen other family members.
A valiant fighter with 40% disability, municipal corporation (MC) official Gagandeep Sharma has worked at a stretch from March 17. A team coordinator, he sends workers for contact tracing and then compiles data.
Sharma recalls the call he received on April 24 at 10.30pm about one person testing positive in Bapu Dham Colony. “Two teams that I alerted and sent to the colony had quarantined 40 to 50 people by 1:30am. By the next day all 190 contacts had been quarantined.”
A fireman now assigned work to trace contacts of Covid-19 patients, Satyendra says he had returned home from work, washed his clothes and was about to sit for dinner when he got the alert.
“By 11pm we were in Bapu Dham and had quarantined at least nine houses,” he says. He finished dinner after getting back home at 2:30am.
Living in separate section of his house, Satyendra communicates with his family through video calls. His parents back in the village call him three to four times day.
SCREENING 25,000 PEOPLE IN TWO DAYS
“We were concerned after hearing about the infections in Bapu Dham Colony,” says Dr Vandana Bhatia, medical officer at the civil dispensary in Sector 26 located close to the colony.
With the support of Dr G Dewan, director, health services, she says her team managed to screen over 25,000 people there in two days. Now 58 have tested positive.
However, while working, “Two to three female health workers and a young man urging people to get screened fainted,” Dr Bhatia adds.
Now, she says, they have moved focus to screening people in the other hotspot in Sector 30, with 20 positive patients.
At home, Dr Bhatia says she cannot meet her octogenarian mother-in-law because of health risks. Her husband, however, refuses to part from her. “He makes me tea when I get back,” she smiles.