About 40 doctors of a distinguished medical college were quarantined after a trauma patient they performed an emergency surgery upon turned out positive for the Wuhan coronavirus on Saturday night. According to a report published in the Times of India, the patient had deliberately hidden his travel history at the time of his admission and it was later discovered that he had attended the Tablighi Jamaat event in Markaz Nizamuddin, New Delhi.
An autorickshaw driver from Khadki, the patient had met with the accident and suffered internal bleeding when he was taken to the hospital on March 31. Two days later, when his body temperature started soaring dangerously, the doctors questioned his mother, who confessed that his son had attended the Tablighi Jamaat congregation in New Delhi.
As per a hospital official, the patient’s family members had initially claimed that he had no travel history. A team of doctors, along with nurses, had performed an emergency surgery involving resection of the part of his injured intestine. However, when the patient developed fever a couple of days later, the hospital staff became suspicious and enquired his mother about his travel history. It was then that the patient’s mother admitted that her son had returned from the Tablighi Jamaat meet organised in Markaz Nizamuddin, New Delhi. The patient’s throat swab sample was then sent for test on Friday and the report which came a day later said the patient has tested positive for COVID-19.
Soon after the patient being positive for novel coronavirus came in, the patient was shifted to YCM hospital in Pimpri. The throat swab samples of 40 surgeons and resident doctors who had come in contact with him were sent to the National Institute of Virology. The doctors have been placed in quarantine in separate rooms on one of the hospital’s floors, said a senior official of hospital-cum-college.
Besides 40 doctors, 30 other hospital employees, including nurses, attendants and cleaning staff members, who are believed to have been exposed to the patient were also quarantined. Their throat swab samples have also been sent for testing.
There seems to be no end to the wrath unleashed by the Tablighi Jamaat miscreants who attended the Markaz Nizamuddin congregation in New Delhi. They have acted as the vector of the deadly contagion, spreading the infection as far as Assam, Tripura in the far east to Tamil Nadu in the south. The Jamaat errants have also been unforthcoming and deceitful in revealing their travel history, thereby exposing the unsuspecting people around them to the threat of COVID-19, that has so far affected 1.2 million people worldwide with 65,000 fatalities.
In India, Tablighi Jamaat has emerged as the newest hotspot with more than 1,000 cases in the country linked to the Jamaat congregation in March. The government on Sunday claimed that Tablighi Jamaat has significantly contributed to the rise of coronavirus outbreak in the country, citing that the cases are doubling in 4.1 days as against the earlier number of confirmed cases that doubled in around 7.4 days on an average.
