BENGALURU: A 28-year-old resident of Bommanahalli, Sangeetha (name changed), who had allegedly given her samples to a door-to-door testing team from the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagar Palike, has gone missing for the last four days after she was picked up by an ambulance, stating that she was Covid-positive. Sangeetha’s brother-in-law Vikas said that on September 3 afternoon, four people in PPE came to their house saying they were conducting Covid testing. “They took samples of our family members and also the neighbourhood.
But the next day, two men came in an ambulance, saying my sister-in-law was Covid-positive and she had to be shifted to Prashanth Hospital. They didn’t allow her to take her phone, saying it was not allowed inside the hospital. They asked me and my brother-in-law to come to the hospital later,” he said. But when they went to the hospital, they were told that there was no patient named Sangeetha.
“We called the BBMP helpline, who told us that no door-to-door testing was commissioned by the Palike in our area, and that there was no positive patient named Sangeetha. It has been four days and my sister-in-law is still missing” Vikas said.
Sangeetha’s husband filed a complaint at the Bommanhalli police station. “The woman hasn’t been found and we are still investigating,” a police officer said. A BBMP official from Bommanahalli zone said, “The ambulance is not from BBMP nor was any test conducted from our end.
We don’t do swab testing or shift a patient in an ambulance without sending an SMS to the patient, giving details of the ambulance driver, phone number etc. More so if a woman is involved. All our ambulances are fitted with GPS and we track them end to end. The moment a patient is picked up, the ambulance staff click a picture and send it to the control room. We are also following up with the police and so far, we know that it was a private ambulance.”