The Government Medical College Hospital (MCH), Thiruvananthapuram, the designated tertiary care COVID hospital for the district, has emerged as a COVID amplifying zone with several doctors, health care workers contracting the infection from patients coming in for general medical care, while at the same time, cross infection could also be resulting in many patients going back with COVID infection from the hospital.
On Thursday, around 30 postgraduate residents in General Surgery Department were forced to go on quarantine after three of their PG colleagues and two house surgeons tested positive for COVID-19.
MCH doctors said that even when the hospital has a separate COVID OP for patients who are coming for general care from high-risk/containment zones, with intense disease transmission in the community, this separation hardly mattered now.
There could be any number of asymptomatic COVID cases among the general patients who would be bringing infection inadvertently into the hospital. Health workers who contract the disease from these patients could similarly be spreading the infection elsewhere to other patients in the hospital. In fact, this is exactly what seems to have happened now.
Sources said that last week, a patient who had been recuperating after surgery (all patients undergo COVID test now prior to surgery) in ward 19 tested positive for COVID-19 after the 10th day or so.
“This had to be a hospital-acquired infection, probably carried to other patients by junior doctors, because two more patients in the opposite ward, ward 18, then tested positive. Now we have five doctors in the Surgery department who are positive and an entire work force of PGs gone on quarantine,” sources told The Hindu.
More precautions
While hospitals becoming disease transmission zones during the pandemic has been reported globally, as the designated COVID hospital, more precautions should have been there to prevent general patients and visitors to the hospital from acquiring infection or bringing infection in, many doctors feel.
A lot of civil works are currently on in the MCH, which has also resulted in additional crowding and space constraints, all of which could be heightening the existing risk. In fact, MCHs should never have been made COVID hospitals at all because the risks posed to non-COVID patients was too much, which was now becoming very evident, doctors said.