A video of a Bengaluru doctor making a passionate appeal to fellow doctors to join him and his colleague to treat COVID-19 patients at the HBS hospital in Shivajinagar has started doing the rounds on social media and messaging platforms.
The caption of the video says, “‘Doctors and Nursing Staff required IMMEDIATELY Contact Dr Shariq.”
The hospital told TNM on Sunday evening that they need 48 doctors, and after the video was published, they received calls from around 5-6 doctors.
Doctors and nurses can call Umer, a corodinator for the exercise, at 9901699144.
“I speak from the ICU of HBS Hospital. It’s been a virtual bloodbath. I came in the morning at like 7:30 in the morning and its 12’o’clock midnight right now. Patients are continuously calling me now ‘cause their fathers are breathless, their brothers are breathless and they cannot find a room in Bengaluru and at this time if you see there is one Mr Shiva and me. There is no other doctor willing to work in this hospital. I have beds, I have oxygen beds, I have ventilators, I have all the equipment. I have another 30 beds like this but I don’t have doctors working here. I find them on WhatsApp. I need 6 hours of your time in a day. Please this is my fervent request. This is the time to show we care. Sometimes the army is in the frontline, sometimes the fire people are in the frontline, sometimes the police is in the frontline. Right now, you and I, my fellow doctors, are in the frontline, let us show that we care for humanity,” says Dr Taha Mateen in the moving video, his hands folded.
Pointing at the patients being treated, he says, “This is somebody’s mother, this is somebody’s brother and this is somebody’s dad. Are we gonna stand up? Let us show we care. It does not matter how long we live, what matters is how we live. Let us be afraid of our creator and work for this moment as true believers. Let us work, thank you very much.”
At present, a few instances have been reported from Bengaluru of COVID-19 patients or patients with symptoms dying in want of treatment as either their family could not arrange for a bed or hospitals—government or private. According to figures, released by the state government as of Saturday, 7250 persons in Bengaluru have COVID-19 and many are actively being treated for the disease leading to a crisis.
Speaking to TNM, Dr Mehdi Kaleem, Mercy Angels, an organisation of volunteers, workin closely with the HBS hospital, said, “We are looking for duty doctors, they can be just MBBS graduates or specialist doctors (intensivists) with experience in intensive care (IC). We are looking for doctors here who can incubate people to the ventilators for the intensivists. We are also trying to scale up other facilities as well and for that we need a lot of these doctors. Today we are in a situation where we are not getting doctors even though we are trying out to reach as much as we can. We are trying to look for doctors who are working both in the public and private set up."