'It is 7AM in the morning. The roads are empty. Beside a clogged sewer, a man in his 50s holding a long rod changes to his uniform— a pair of torn shirt and trousers. Rajan*, a sanitation worker in the “Second Best” realty city of India, goes down the sewer everyday with nothing but a rod and a handkerchief on his face. The foul smell emerges from the deep sewer and soon his whole body is covered in black fluid which is the toilet waste of the nearby high class housing societies. He opens the lid of the manhole he is about to crawl into.
'A decision by the government of Madhya Pradesh to convert the state capital’s Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre into a COVID19-designated facility has had a devastating effect on one of India’s most vulnerable communities. The BMHRC is a 500-bed super-speciality hospital, which was set up to care exclusively for the first-, second- and third-generation survivors of a chemical disaster that is commonly known as the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984.
'A Dubai resident has blamed ‘coronavirus paranoia’ for his father’s death in Madhya Pradesh, India, last week. Moeen Ali, 39, said his father Sayyed Aashiq Ali, 65, was suffering from breathlessness caused by a heart ailment yet no private hospital in his hometown would admit him over coronavirus fears.
'The Press Council of India on Friday asked the print media to stop the publicity and advertisement of AYUSH-related claims for COVID-19 treatment in order to prevent dissemination of misleading information about AYUSH drugs and services.
'A government hospital in Rajasthan's Bharatpur district has come under the scanner for allegedly citing the religion of a pregnant Muslim woman as grounds for refusing to admit her at the hospital. The pregnant woman, after leaving the hospital, delivered the child inside the ambulance but the infant could not survive. "My pregnant wife had to deliver a child. She was referred from Sikri to the Janana Hospital in the district headquarter but the doctors here mentioned that we should go to Jaipur because we are Muslim.
'In the week since India locked down to contain the spread of Covid-19, Sanjay Tadas has been unable to go to work and wears a homemade grey mask when he steps out of his lane. Apart from that, however, little has changed in the way he and his family live inside Shiv Nagar slum in Mumbai’s Andheri suburb. “We are six of us living in one 100-sq-ft room, so maintaining distance from each other is impossible, of course,” said Tadas, a clerk in municipal office in Mumbai. At night, Tadas, his wife and four children squeeze in next to each other as they always do.
'Sale of cow urine has picked up in Gujarat as belief that it has immunity boosting property gains ground in the state amid the coronavirus outbreak. Vallabh Kathiria, chairman of Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog, told ET that consumption of goumutra (cow urine) and goumutra ark, or condensed cow urine, in the state has risen significantly after the coronavirus outbreak to about 6,000 litres a day. Cow urine has long been promoted by cow entrepreneurs as a panacea for a myriad of ailments.
'Five people with an alleged history of alcohol addiction have committed suicide — five days into the lockdown in Kerala — and reports point to the health woes of alcohol addicts building up into a major concern on the sidelines of the battle against COVID-19 across the state. Reports of suicide attempts by two alcohol addicts emerged in Malappuram on Saturday besides a sudden increase in the number of admissions at de-addiction centres and mental health units at government hospitals...'
'On the first day of a three-week nationwide lockdown, Jan Swasthya Sahyog’s hospital, in Ganiyari village of Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur district, remained largely empty. In a place like Ganiyari, an empty hospital does not mean that less people are ill; it means the ill are simply not getting medical care. At 8 pm on 24 March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, effective from midnight.
'...Soumita Basu, a 37-year-old entrepreneur from Kolkata, has arthritis and has not been able to access her medicines since the lockdown. She has been prescribed hydroxychloroquine for her illness, but since reports emerged that the medicine may possibly prevent Covid-19, it is in short supply in medical stores. “People have started hoarding hydroxychloroquine, a very potent drug, without a doctor’s prescription. People like me who need it for our survival are not getting access to it,” she told ThePrint.
