health

survey

Pune Municipal Corporation

PMC

officer

While a lot of dishes and utensils were clanged across the country to felicitate the people at the frontiers of the battle against the pandemic, the sentiments on the ground is very different,workers are realising much to their distress. Out in the field collecting data, running surveys to check and contain the spread of COVID-19, they are being greeted with anger and abuse at many places, which the authorities are now feeling compelled to call out. The whole experience of the health professionals who are already risking getting infected has turned particularly harrowing.The ambience of mistrust and suspicion created by the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens, has come to haunt some of these health workers. Any efforts to collect data, even in the thick of the COVID-19 spread, are being met with anger and abuse. Just as an episode was reported by Mirror earlier in March, of health officials being hounded and shooed away from Kondhwa, a similar incident has been reported from the slums of Laxmi Nagar in Yerawada, where a senior citizen had tested positive for the virus.Tasked with conducting a survey, tracing the people who came in contact with the man and also checking for the spread of the epidemic, health officials came in for severe verbal abuse. “The people in the area actually stopped thethat was underway by grabbing and tearing up the documents the field workers were carrying. The staff had to actually flee the scene after that,” explained Vijay Landge, assistant commissioner of) at its Yerawada ward office.“The residents of the slum assumed that our staff was out there collecting information for census and quickly linked it with the CAA and NRC issues,” theelaborated. Pursuant to this, the ward office approached the cops the next day and the survey was conducted in the presence of the police. “The staff on the ground are already in high risk of contracting the virus and such situations do not augur well for their safety. They are wrong and simply unacceptable,” Landge observed.Similarly, an on-duty medical officer was harassed and cussed by the residents of Nira Shiv village at Purandar, while conducting a door-to-door visit on Wednesday. Her folly allegedly was that she picked a single person for a sample screening for COVID-19.While the woman test-ed negative, the family took her being singled out for the test as an insult and feared that they would face social stigma due to the process. They pounced on the doctor, hurling expletives at her. “The person was made to undergo the screening as she was pregnant and had mild symptoms of the virus, prompting us to quarantine her and run the test. Instead of being happy that she tested negative, the family started abusing me. I brought it to the notice of the district health officer immediately,” the beleaguered doctor pointed out.“We have zero tolerance for such behaviour, that too against a medical doctor. When this was brought to my notice I gave permission to file an FIR against the people involved. However, the family later accepted their mistake and apologised to the medical officer. She then decided not to file the complaint,” informed Dr Bhagwan Pawar, district health office for Pune.