Forgetting the front line

Nearly every day we hear about more doctors and paramedical staff succumbing to Covid-19 in their battle to save patients suffering from the disease. It is surprising that there is no regular update exclusively on the medical staff and if you want to find out how many of them in total have died or have been infected you don’t have a single portal for such information, in fact you end up with the combined tally covering all the people without a separate dataset for medical staff in Pakistan. Moreover, the guard of honour and salutes presented to healthcare professionals in March have also evaporated in thin air and now practically nobody is talking about them anymore, apart from reports of their individual deaths or infections.

Healthcare staff are fighting at the frontlines of the Covid-19 outbreak and they must be properly respected and rewarded for their services that are now beyond their normal call of duty. It is distressing not only for the healthcare staff but also for their relatives that in many hospitals across the country they are forced to work long hours and that too without personal protective equipment. We have seen protests by healthcare staff in cities such as Dera Ismail Khan, Quetta, and Sukkur, where they complained about lack of PPEs and N-95 masks. In the absence of a regular supply of new PPEs and N-95 masks they are forced to work with used ones that are already exposed, and this may even be causing an increasing number of deaths and infections among the healthcare community.

A recent report from the health department in Lahore revealed that quite a few doctors and nurses are already infected with coronavirus across Punjab. The case may not be different in other parts of the country because healthcare staff get the most exposure to the virus. We have an alarming rate of infection among healthcare professionals and the trend must be contained. We suggest that everyday the number of deaths and infections among the healthcare community including the janitorial staff be made public and special allowances be announced for them and their security – in the face of the violence they face from a confused public. They are our frontline warriors and we need to protect and support them as much as we can.