“Can you tell me again how you are related to the patient?” Sangeeta Patil of the Malpa Dongri municipal school, one of the 50-odd teachers...
“Can you tell me again how you are related to the patient?” Sangeeta Patil of the Malpa Dongri municipal school, one of the 50-odd teachers staffing the Covid-19 war room in Mumbai’s K-East ward, repeats herself over the telephone.
It is a couple of hours into her shift and Patil, tasked with making follow up calls to patients in home isolation, has just been informed of a patient’s death by a relative. How can that be, she asks a colleague. Only three days ago, she had spoken to 53-year-old Prakash Jagdale. He had no symptoms then, and today he is dead. Patil is visibly shaken.
Around her, a call centre-like humdrum belies the desperation and panic on the other end of the phone calls. “We do show urgency, but there is a thin line between urgency and panic,” said Dr Prachi Jadhav, in-charge of the war room. “We have all been trained to be calm and speak with clarity to the patients and their relatives. Our job is to guide them on next steps.”
One of the key learnings from the early months of the pandemic for the city’s civic body, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, has been that strict triaging of patients is essential to...
