COVID-19 Tragedy Of Errors At Ahmedabad Hospital

Ahmedabad, one of the country's major urban hotspots, has over the last few days gained notoriety for at least 2 tragic errors on the part of hospital authorities. Imagine the plight of 30-year-old Sagar Shah, who was still recovering from his father's death from COVID-19, when he got SMS messages which stated that his father "Kishorebhai Heeralal Shah has been transferred to COVID hospital, Asarwa, Ahmedabad on May 30 at 6:38 pm."

The tragedy is that his father Kishorebhai had expired on May 16 and was cremated by Sagar himself. The messages, a reflection of callousness and insensitivity on the part of the authorities, pained and angered him.

Sagar also knew what he underwent to claim his father's body—a local Congress MLA had to intervene for this to come about after hours of waiting! He had to file an FIR with regard to the jewellery his 64-year-old father had been wearing, as also the theft of Rs.10,000 in cash from his wallet.

Sagar's short video message has gone viral on social media. The tuition teacher sought to highlight the situation in the Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad which was described recently by the Gujarat High Court as a dungeon. Sagar wished to bring to the fore the problems faced by relatives of patients of COVID-19 admitted to the Civil Hospital and Gujarat Cancer and Research Institute (GCRI), which is located in the same campus.

The hospital authorities attributed the mistake to 2 patients with similar names, which they said had resulted in the confusion. They also claimed that the server went down after an error in data entry and that this has since been fixed.

In a similar incident a day earlier, Nilesh Nikte, received calls saying that his father-in-law Devram Bhisiker's coronavirus report returned negative and that he would be shifted to a non-Covid ward. The tragedy in this incident too was that Devram expired on May 29 afternoon and was cremated by Nilesh himself.

The Gujarat government authorities tried to explain the incident by saying that the call centre person informed the family about the negative report without knowledge of the fact that Devram had expired. The authorities reportedly denied that there was any carelessness involved.