More on Covid-19

HYDERABAD/KALABURAGI: India’s first Covid-19 death has triggered a blame game between states and exposed the state of surveillance of suspected patients. While Telangana authorities blamed Karnataka for letting the “suspected patient” travel, authorities in Kalaburagi maintained he had left “against medical advice”.A day after tests in Bengaluru confirmed that the 76-year-old man, who died on March 11, was positive for coronavirus, it emerged that he had left a private hospital in Kalaburagi two days before his death and travelled to Hyderabad. District authorities said he left without their knowledge even as his samples had been sent for testing.In the Telangana capital, the man went to a state-run hospital but left without testing. The patient and his family moved about in the central part of the city and reached Old City where they stayed with a relative. Over the next two days, he got himself admitted to a private hospital, after having visited two others. When he was once again urged to go to a government hospital, he headed home instead. The man died within an hour of leaving the Hyderabad hospital.At the state-run Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad, which is the nodal centre for treating coronavirus patients in the city, the patient reportedly waited in the car while his family made enquiries about testing.Dr G Srinivas Rao, director of public health, said, “Only the patient’s attendants went up to the seventh floor. Then they left for another hospital. They only requested for testing and wanted to take the patient to a private hospital.”On Friday, Kalaburagi authorities said samples of four family members have been sent for tests; one of them has shown flu symptoms.Rao blamed Karnataka and the patient’s family for the breach of protocol. “This is a major blunder by the Karnataka government. How can they allow the patient to leave, knowing he was a suspected coronavirus patient? The attendants did not reveal the travel history to our (state) hospital when asked. The patient was old and had co-morbidities, no one would have guessed that he was a Covid-19 suspect unless the travel history was known,” he said.The man flew into Hyderabad from Jeddah on February 29 and was screened at the airport but showed no symptoms then although he had a history of hypertension and asthma. From Hyderabad he went to Kalaburagi. On March 6, he complained of cough and fever and was taken to the OPD of a private hospital in Kalaburagi. He was admitted on March 9 after which his swab samples were sent to the Viral Research Diagnostic Laboratory of Gulbarga Institute of Medical Sciences for testing. GIMS, which does not have the facility to test for Covid-19, sent the samples to Bengaluru.An official statement said Kalaburagi deputy commissioner Sharath B and the district health officer met the man’s relatives and told them to shift him to GIMS but the “attendees of the patient, without waiting for test results, shifted the man to a hospital in Hyderabad against medical advice”. It is, however, unexplained how he left without the knowledge of the authorities and why no efforts were made to track him.Mubeen Ahmad, general manager of the private hospital where the patient was treated, told TOI, “Hospital authorities and the district administration asked the man’s family to move him to GIMS, but they refused. We had no option but to discharge him.”On Friday, the man’s son countered that the district administration had kept them in the dark. “The administration did not inform us about the quarantine ward. We would have moved to GIMS had the DC informed us. The administration neglected the case and the private hospital forcibly sent us to Hyderabad, saying the patient cannot be treated there.”