Bengaluru: Untested patient infected me, says doctor

BENGALURU: A 32-year-old doctor working in a private hospital, who was Bengaluru’s first health professional to be infected with Covid-19, is now cured, discharged and in home quarantine. The tryst with the virus has only made him more confident as a doctor as he could see the entire system from a patient’s viewpoint as well, he says.
While state medical records describe him as a contact of a 43-year-old man, who was suffering from Severe Acute Respiratory Infection (SARI) and tested positive for Covid-19, the doctor believes he was infected by a pregnant woman from Jharkhand he treated and who died before she could be tested for coronavirus.
“I never met the SARI patient. I only examined his chest X-ray on screen and spoke to his treating doctors on phone,” he says. According to him, an entire team of doctors at his hospital had treated the pregnant woman for breathlessness in the third week of March and she died before the health department gave approval to test her for Covid-19.
The woman had tested negative for H1N1 influenza A twice, but she was a Covid-19 case, he asserts. She came to Bengaluru for infertility treatment and conceived through IVF. Her husband lived in West Asia, while she stayed with her sister here. “While treating her, the doctors and nurses weren’t wearing PPEs and N-95 masks as they weren’t available. We had only surgical masks,” the doctor said.
According to the him, the group of doctors and nurses, eight in all, fell ill after the woman’s death. “I had high fever for over a week and went for a test on April 8. All these details were known to the health department. When I tested positive, my colleagues were put in institutional quarantine. But they were all tested on the 12th day of self-quarantine (April 20) and barring one nurse, the rest tested negative,” the doctor said.
Had all his colleagues been tested the same day as him, they would have been found positive. But the tests were done over 15 days after they showed symptoms, he believes. The hospital in the heart of the city is still shut as the nurse who tested positive lived in a hostel in the same area. “Hospital authorities have been very cooperative in my entire journey,” the doctor said. The guidelines have changed now. Symptomatic contacts are being tested within a day of two of contact tracing.
When asked about the woman’s case that doesn’t figure in the state’s Covid-19 data, health commissioner Pankaj Kumar Pandey said he would look into it.