Two-and-a-half-year-old Devan (name changed) is one of the youngest COVID-19 patients in Delhi. His father too has tested positive, as has his three-month pregnant mother who works as a healthcare worker at the Delhi government-run Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital.

A total of 106 employees of the hospital, including doctors and nurses, have tested positive for the virus. This is the highest number of COVID-19 infection among healthcare staff in any hospital in Delhi. While the hospital claims to have taken all precautions to avoid the spread of the virus, its healthcare workers claim it failed to “properly isolate” suspected cases and strictly follow standard protocol.

The Medical Director of the hospital, M.M. Kohli, did not respond to multiple calls and text messages. A senior hospital official, however, said: “Not all of these cases are hospital-acquired. Many of the employees come from hotspots and they could have been infected there.” The official said the hospital is now taking “extra care”.

The infection ‘source’

In the second week of April, the hospital announced that cubicle 1 of the Medicine Emergency Ward 1 will be kept for patients suspected of COVID-19 infection, said sources.

In the next one week, more than three patients died in cubicle 1 and at least one of them, a 40-year-old woman, tested positive for COVID-19. Since then, the infection has spread among the hospital employees, said the sources.

The Hindu spoke to six healthcare workers, including doctors, who worked in Ward 1, and all of them said that cubicle 1, which is separated from cubicle 2 only by a shoulder-high wall, did not provide “proper isolation”. They also claimed “lapses” on the part of the hospital and said the spread could have been avoided to a “large extent”.

The hospital’s Head of Department (medicine) Harender Kumar told The Hindu, “It was very difficult to separate suspected and non-suspected COVID cases as the hospital was not built that way. The problems began when our hospital was turned from a COVID hospital to a non-COVID one. When it was a COVID hospital, we had all the facilities. Most of the healthcare workers who have tested positive in Delhi [over 375] are employed in non-COVID hospitals.” On May 3, the president of Federation of Delhi Government Nurses, Jagdish Kulhari, wrote to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and the Health Secretary complaining about the “mismanagement” at Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar Hospital. He said that no action has been taken so far.

Families allowed

Patients with issues such as diabetes and high blood pressure are admitted to Medical Emergency Ward 1, which has at least 36 beds and six cubicles.

Though isolation was mandatory for suspected patients, the healthcare workers said families were allowed to visit cubicle 1. In fact, the patients in cubicle 1, their attendants and others admitted to Ward 1 used the same toilets.

“Her [the woman who died] sister was sitting on her bed and holding her hand,” said a doctor. The patient’s husband also confirmed that her sister was with her the whole time and she did not wear PPE.

“There were not enough PPE for us, how could we give them to family members?” asked a healthcare worker.

All the six workers agreed that cubicle 1 was ill-equipped to handle suspected COVID-19 cases. It did not even have a separate set of workers to attend to the patients.

Worried about the spread of virus, several doctors and nurses met the HoD (medicine) and complained about the problems with cubicle 1 Around April 20, after the issue was raised multiple times, the hospital shifted the patients from cubicle 1 to ‘Ward 2A’, an isolation facility earmarked only for suspected cases. The new ward has a separate set of healthcare workers, said hospital officials.

Delay in results

Several healthcare workers said their samples were taken on April 23, but the report did not come till May 1. A second sample was taken on May 1 and the reports came on May 3, in which many tested positive. “In these 10 days, we were under home quarantine and risked infecting our families,” a worker said.

The 40-year-old woman died on April 18 and her report came out on April 20. The nurses and doctors who attended to her met the HoD on April 21, but their quarantine order was issued on April 22. “If they had quarantined suspected cases on time, less number of people would have been infected,” a worker said.