Ambika PK, a 46-year-old nurse working in a private hospital in Delhi, died on May 25, days after she tested positive for Covid-19. She was...
Ambika PK, a 46-year-old nurse working in a private hospital in Delhi, died on May 25, days after she tested positive for Covid-19. She was the first nurse in India’s capital to have perished in the pandemic.
“The last thing my mum told me before dying was that she had accompanied a patient with Covid symptoms in the ambulance to the hospital,” said her son, Akhil Kumar S.
But two months since, her children are struggling to claim the Rs 50 lakh insurance that the Central government announced in March for healthcare workers who die in the line of Covid-19 related duty.
The reason: they cannot prove that Ambika was involved in the treatment of Covid-19 patients and may have come in contact with one who could have infected her. The hospital where she worked has refused to give a certificate attesting to this possibility.
In Kolkata, when 69-year-old orthopaedic surgeon Sisir Mandal died of the virus on April 27, getting the required documentation was a breeze for his family. “He was seeing patients so he may have got the virus from one of his patients,” said his son, Soham Mandal, also an orthopaedic surgeon. The private hospital where he worked was quick to issue a...
