KANHANGAD: Sunday, March 15, 2.30 am. A bus carrying around 48 Malayali students from Kalaburagi in Karnataka pulled up before the District Hospital at Chemmattamvayal near Kanhangad. The students were a panicked lot. They were fleeing the town after it reported India’s first Covid-19 death. “All of them wanted to be tested for the infection. There was chaos in the bus,” said health inspector Balan P V, who is part of the help desk -- a tent pitched in front of the District Hospital.
No one on the bus ran a temperature. “We assured them they were fine and asked them to go home,” he said. Kasaragod being the entry point to Kerala, Balan and his team have to work round the clock. Monday, March 16, 7.30 pm: Chief minister announced in Thiruvananthapuram that one person from Kasaragod tested positive for Covid-19. Late in the night, the public came to know that the patient arrived from Dubai in an Air India Express flight on Saturday. Around 1 am, passengers of the flight started arriving at the District Hospital. Balan was called in.
“All of them were worried and everybody wanted to be screened,” he said. Simi M, a senior nurse managing the isolation ward, said around 48 passengers turned up at the ward.
The following day, 32 students of the Central University of Kerala returned from Himachal Pradesh. “Their hostel mates were not allowing them in,” said Balan. The students came to the District Hospital for testing and they were found to be fineThe health officials and medical staff in the district have been on their toes since the first positive case was reported in Kasaragod district. “We have to handle both kinds of people,” said Sonia Stephen, a counsellor at the help desk.
Kasaragod is the only district in Kerala without a medical college, and it is handling around 400 suspected Covid-19 cases, said District Medical Officer Dr A V Ramdas. When the first suspected case arrived at the District Hospital in January, the officials immediately turned the pay ward into an isolation ward. “We do not have the infrastructure to prepare for an avalanche, but we wanted to be ready for a landslip,” he said.
Though not a medical college, it is the only District Hospital in Kerala which has a National Quality Assurance Standards (NQAS) certificate, said Dr Rijith Krishnan, who is part of the Covid-control team. One of the parameters for NQAS is infection control. Since the beginning of the outbreak, the isolation ward has been managed by the same five nurses. “Since February, none of us had a day off. We have done it before and we will do it again,” said Simi. She was a nurse at the Kozhikode Taluk Hospital during the Nipah outbreak.
“But there is no need for society to call us malakha (angels). We are professionals. Just treat us like professionals,” she said. Nurses in private hospitals had to fight for minimum wages despite the Supreme Court order, she said. Even the government exploited nurses, said her colleague Sakhila P. When Simi, a mother two children aged 6 years and 10 years, reaches home, her husband jokingly asks her to get in only after taking a bath. She does that without fail. “In the past month and a half, none of us had to give our swabs for testing. We take care of ourselves too,” she said. Both the nurses said that Corona has taught Malayalis to be more hygienic.