Covid patients at Belagavi Institute of Medical Sciences want to return home at the earliest

Belagavi: The situation at the Belagavi Institute of Medical Sciences (BIMS) makes for a perfect study in contrast: On the one hand, the hospital is struggling to cope with the sharp rise in the number of Covid-19 patients being admitted, those already receiving treatment are getting increasingly upset with the poor facilities and are eager to get discharged as early as possible.
In fact, many videos and tweets have been doing the round on social media portals, wherein patients are airing their grievances about the lack of hygiene and sanitation at BIMS, and requesting the authorities to do all they can to ensure they were discharged at the earliest.
One of the patients has pointed to the lack of sanitisers near beds, adding that cleanliness too had been given the short shrift at the institution. An exhausted BIMS employee said that she could shift the patients to other beds, but ruled out any possibility of prematurely discharging patients.
One patient tagged deputy chief minister Laxman Savadi in his tweet, seeking his intervention to have him shifted to a hospital in Athani. “Water is not supplied regularly at BIMS, and the lavatories, owing to neglect of the personnel, have become filthy. There is no water in the cisterns in the toilets,” the patient, admitted to BIMS on Tuesday, told STOI.
“Doctors visit us very irregularly, and food is also not being provided to us on time,” he added.
Worse still, the ceiling of a Covid-19 ward at BIMS is leaking, said a few patients. Consequently, many of them are compelled to shift around to avoid getting wet. “Asymptomatic patients who need no treatment must be sent home. Otherwise, those in need of medical attention may die,” said another patient.
Patient admitted to hospital tests -ve
If the litany of grievances that the patients have was not enough, there was more trouble for BIMS, where a man from Rajasthan, who had come to Belagavi from Bengaluru on June 10, was admitted before tests confirmed that he was positive for novel coronavirus. “On July 14, an ambulance came to my home and I was taken to the hospital. A nurse informed me that tests conducted on a swab sample had indicated I was positive for the infection. But three days later, the same nurse informed me that there had been a mistake, and that I was not infected,” the man said.