Doctors without protection

It simply defies belief that dozens of doctors and nurses have had to resort to a hunger strike in Lahore because their straight-forward demand for adequate protective equipment continues to fall on deaf ears. Surely, nobody needs any reminding anymore that medical workers are the frontline warriors in what is certainly the world's biggest collective fight for survival in a very long time. You can have the best doctors in the world, but making them do their job without even the most basic protective equipment is like signing death warrants not just for them but also their families, colleagues and whoever else they come into contact with. And that, of course, also makes patients more vulnerable; some of whom might not be infected yet the chances of catching Covid-19 from a needlessly infected doctor cannot be ruled out. Such, unfortunately, is the cost of folly in this existential fight. And this is not the first time that doctors have been forced to take their demands out onto the streets. Just this month, about 50 or so doctors were baton-charged and arrested in Quetta because they were fed up with nobody doing anything about chronic shortage of essential safety gear despite repeated pleading and begging.

The provincial government's response at the time, which aptly betrayed its ignorance of the complexity of the matter, was that doctors directly dealing with coronavirus patients were indeed provided with all the safety equipment they needed, but the same need was not felt for the rest of their colleagues. And this was despite the fact that doctors dealing with non-Covid-19 patients registered more infections as well as deaths, something that the government ought to have known. It was only when the military stepped in with the necessary kits that the matter was settled. Now, even a conservative estimate puts the number of infected medical workers nationwide at around 150. There are also reports of a good three dozen doctors, nurses and paramedics contracting the virus in just one hospital in Multan; and seven family members of one doctor in Lahore also testing positive. This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. These medical workers would most likely have come in contact with other patients, or people with just signs of the virus, which may have subsequently got infected. If it turns out that workers at various medical facilities caught the coronavirus simply because the government did not provide them with the necessary protective equipment, and they had to improvise with whatever they had, then who should be held responsible for compromising our first line of defence in this fight?

The standard official response that there was just not enough time, money, etc., will just not wash anymore. The fact is that relevant authorities have been consistently behind the curve in terms of dealing with this emergency. They should have begun stocking up when the virus first started spreading like wildfire outside China. Yet, quite clearly, not enough was done when there was still time. In fact, just recently when the pharmaceutical industry complained of not enough raw material being imported into the country, they were told that the government was using whatever trading lines were still open to get as much protective equipment as it could. It seems, then, a case of misplaced priorities and too little too late. The world stands at a very crucial inflexion point. Even countries with far more confirmed cases and deaths than Pakistan, like Italy, Spain and the United States, are slowly and carefully reopening their economies. That is because they have done all that was practically, and medically, possible to flatten the curve and move onto the next phase of economic recovery. We need economic activity to pick up even faster than others, given the small size of our reserves and the high level of poverty. But we will never be able to move properly in that direction till our medical response is first up to the mark. And if our doctors and nurses are staging hunger strikes because of a lack of something as necessary as basic protective equipment, then we are still quite far from that moment. It's like expecting firefighters without any water or protection to put out a great inferno. Till the right steps are taken, the government must of course answer for all the precious lives lost to the coronavirus.