Nalgonda/Telangana: The raging second wave of Covid-19 has brought down the governments on knees. Covid patients in Metropolitans gasp for Oxygen as the hospitals reach their saturation and the virus is onwards to plunge into the hinterlands where healthcare is just read in books and not practiced in life.
If you want to know about the problems faced by Covid infected poverty-stricken people living in villages, you should know the tale of Shiva, who quarantined himself on a tree for 11 days after testing positive for the virus.
Keeping his hope intact, gritty Shiva built a cot with two sets of bamboo sticks on a tree and had quarantined for 11 days. He did all this in fear of spreading the virus to his family as his house is small. This story of course displays his strong character but also shows the weak links in the remote villages.
A juxtaposed tale that displays the pathetic condition of medical practices in Indian villages is from a remote place in Uttar Pradesh, where the Covid patients are left in a lurch under a tree, according to a report in Reuters. In Mewla Gopalgarh, a not very far hinterland from Delhi, people die in a span of two days after suffering from fever. There is no medical practitioner and no nearby Covid testing centre. The Covid-sick in the village are taken care of by leaving them to their fate under a tree somewhere in the corner of the village.
In another village somewhere in Bihar, where people live near to disdain of government and far from awareness and development, there is a sudden surge in the death toll for the last two weeks. People die due to breathlessness and cold which are symptoms of Covid but there is no Covid facility to get tested and so are the deaths not due to the virus. If the basics of having doctors in the PHC and Covid testing centres are not available, there is no way to prevent the virus and know the cause of death. The villages' data misses from 'Coronavirus All India Report' when the testing facility being a far-fetched idea.
It's next to impossible for people in villages living in small houses with no or single washrooms to not spread virus from Covid positive patients as there is no space for quarantining. After the surge in Covid numbers, the Centre recently issued fresh SOPs which focus on clinical management practices and Covid containment in rural and semi-urban areas.
Village level surveillance, training in antigen testing and teleconsultation with doctors are the focal points in the Centre's new guidelines to battle Covid-19 which is spreading in villages.