In the last week of June, a mental health professional and her husband tested positive for Covid-19 in South Delhi. The state’s health depa...
In the last week of June, a mental health professional and her husband tested positive for Covid-19 in South Delhi. The state’s health department responded promptly. Health workers called within hours to check how they were doing and set up telephonic consultations with doctors almost instantly – the couple had a mild infection and were quarantining themselves at home. Municipality workers also arrived the next day to sanitise the building they lived in.
In the subsequent days, there were more pre-recorded follow-up calls to enquire about their progress and if they needed medical attention.
But in all those calls, full of queries, neither the psychologist nor her husband was once asked whom they may have come in contact with in the previous few days. The woman had conducted mental health workshops for healthcare workers around a week earlier – not too long before she started showing symptoms.
“There were no attempts to do contact tracing,” she recalled. “They didn’t ask us where we had gone, whom we may have met, none of that. In fact, I called my neighbours on my own to tell them that they should get tested as we may have come in contact on the lift or in any of the...
