Storytellers

Covid-19 – call to put back people in the centre and not the disease
Vijayaprasad Gopichandran and Sudharshini Subramaniam
This blog is a different experiment. Sudharshini and I write our individual thoughts as two sub-blogs and then I synthesize our ideas to create a collective message. This is a follow up to our previous blog titled “Social Distancing….you must be kidding me”.
134 to home-isolation and many more to go…
Sudharshini Subramaniam
Tense and nervous patients were sitting in the Covid-19 isolation ward of my hospital. The government of Tamil Nadu has recently come out with an advisory for home isolation of patients with asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic or mildly symptomatic Covid-19. I walked in, part of a team of doctors, into the ward to see all of them, talk to them and triage them to identify those who can be sent for home isolation and those who need to be admitted into the hospital. The dominant feelings among all were fear, anxiety and worry. All of them wanted to get…

Through the masked face, express empathy
Vijay Gopichandran
For many people Covid-19 and the lock-down have completely changed their lives. For some of us, privileged lot, not much as changed. My 7-day work week has not changed. I am not locked down inside my home and go out to the hospital every day. For some of us, the not so ‘socially active’ lot, not meeting people, not hanging out, not going out for lunches and dinners etc. also do not matter much. But when I look at my work closely, I have realized that so much has changed. The change has been so sudden, but the ambient uncertainty and anxiety of the pandemic has made it imperceptible.
Yesterday, I saw the video of an innovative ‘no contact’ Covid-19 screening clinic. It is a model of screening patients with suspected Covid-19 while minimizing the contact between the patient and the doctor. The video goes like this. The patient’s token number is called out in the public announcement system. A well dressed, confident young man…

Small deeds to maintain normalcy during pandemic times
Vijay Gopichandran
About two weeks ago, two of my colleagues and I sat in a large room, separating ourselves at the recommended 2 meter distance from each other and my senior colleague remarked “It is as though the ‘reset button’ for the world has been pressed. We all will soon have to adapt to a new normal in our lives”. 
It was the beginning of the lock-down of the whole country to contain the spread of Covid-19. Since there are no public transport vehicles on the roads and I do not drive or own any private vehicles, I have started walking from and to the hospital. The distance is not much, just about 3 KM, but I am seeing things which I have never seen before. There are a bunch of people living on the pavements near the metro station on the way to my hospital. They were part of the background tapestry of the urban busy life that I had never noticed them before. One family has a young man, a woman and two scrawny kids. As I wal…

Solidarity in the time of Covid-19
Vijay Gopichandran

(All names reported in this blog are changed for confidentiality purposes)
“Why haven’t your pasted that sticker outside my door?”, asked an anxious elderly lady to the health worker who visited her to check whether any members in her household had cough, cold or fever.
“The lady was very much worried that we were paying less attention to her house compared to the house which had a sticker outside their door. She thought the ones with the sticker outside their house got better attention.”, narrated Mansoor, one of 26 other frontline health workers whom we met yesterday during our field visit to evaluate the cluster containment activity in the city. The field staff are working in a committed and diligent manner, carrying out their role in control of the Covid-19 illness.
We read articles and newspaper reports about the stigma associated with stickers on people’s doors identifying them as quarantined houses and indelible stamps on…

The Pandemic of Corona Virus - COVID-19

By Dr. Sanjai Subha

Everyone in this world is now aware of the word – corona virus and the pandemic caused by it. It has created a tremendous amount of fear, as well as uncertainty among all classes of people, irrespective of the difference that exists among them. How did a virus of such small size evolve as a global problem? Why is everyoneafraid of it? Even the most economically developed countries like the USA, Spain, Italy, and China are finding it difficult to control it? What will happen to India? These questions haunt us daily. In addition, various forms of media like social media, newspapers, and television are fueling the fear and anxiety further. Thanks to social media applications like Facebook, Whats app, Twitter, YouTube, the news arsenal of this era, everyone is on their phone, surfing through various posts, messages throughout the day, panicking simultaneously. The emotion of fear has always been the greatest survival advantage w…

Social distancing…..you must be kidding me


Vijay Gopichandran, Sudharshini Subramaniam, Vinod H Krishnamoorthy


Today the rural clinic was very busy. Between the three of us who were in the clinic, we saw more than 100 patients, some of them with very complex problems. One of the patients we saw today was a 50-year-old lady, Kamala (name changed for confidentiality purposes) with fever, cough, and breathlessness for a week. Even as you are reading this, we know the word that is ringing in your mind – Covid-19. The lady belongs to a very poor family, as do most of our patients. She has no history of travel anywhere beyond the nearest town, nor did she have a history of contact with anyone with travel or diagnosed Covid-19. So, we started treatment, as we would for a typical community-acquired lung infection. To anyways be on the safer side, in case community transmission of the virus had started without us noticing it, we advised her and her daughter on home isolation. The daughter’s rea…