Choice between life and livelihood

Mousumi Akhter, a 22-year-old worker from Lalmonirhat, got sick with some COVID-19 symptoms on May 21 when she was working at a factory in Gazipur. She boarded on a truck, apparently as all sorts of public transports were off the road because of the nationwide lockdown effective then, to go to her village at Patgram in Lalmonirhat district of Bangladesh. 

The risky and illegal travel by a goods carrying vehicle for several hours at night, coupled with her illness, took a heavy toll. She died in the vehicle. 

When the truck was near Tajhat of Rangpur, the driver abandoned the body on the roadside out of coronavirus fear. On information, local police recovered the body and sent it to Rangpur Medical College Hospital morgue the next day. 

Mousumi’s father also rushed to the hospital to take the body to his village and burry it in a local graveyard. Allegedly, however, the local Union Parishad chairman, despite repeated requests, refused to let him conduct the funeral. Worse still, the former reportedly threatened the latter with death and even burning down his home in case of defiance.  

Finding no other option, the father gave a local funeral van driver Tk 5,000 to bury the body in a suitable place. But the latter just dumped the body into the Teesta river flowing by the area, which had been recovered later by Aditmari thana police to give it a ‘proper’ burial in her own village. 

What happened to Mousumi after her death, to tell the truth, is a small wonder. There have so far been scores of incidents in different areas, including the capital, in which COVID-19 patients and even their family members felt like a pariah because of the treatment they received from their neighbours or homeowners. 

Also, cases were there where even family members left the body of once their near and dear ones on the roadside out of fear of infection from the body. Additionally, social stigma is nothing new here, especially during epidemic or outbreak of a new disease. Fortunately, however, relevant authorities appear to be sensitised enough against stigmatising coronavirus affected people as almost all such cases, be it in city or villages, so far have been addressed by them.

But what is more unfortunate is that there appears to have been none in the factory or the community to help the poor worker get access to coronavirus testing and treatment, which led her to take a suicidal decision to get back to her village.  

One can refer here to the Lalmonirhat civil surgeon’s claim that the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) lab test of the sample taken from Mousumi’s body proved negative for novel coronavirus. But one should also take note of the fact that the sample was taken several hours after she died, while a proper coronavirus test requires a sample to be taken at least within three hours of the death as the virus cannot ‘survive’ beyond the time in a body.

In fact, it is the poor management of the health sector on the whole, which is responsible for such a disturbing situation. From the very beginning, most hospitals, public and private, stopped receiving patients, be it COVID or non-COVID. Other than dedicating a few hospitals for coronavirus treatment and issuing innocuous warnings on some repeated occasions against refusal to treat patients, the health ministry is yet to make all hospitals open for all kinds of treatment. 

Even when it comes to COVID-19 treatment, it has failed to take adequate arrangement thus far. This is, perhaps, why, the government continues to try its best to encourage people, ordinary ones for that matter, to fight the virus on their own. And under the circumstances, in recent months, many people, especially who are not wealthy and have no connections with those holding power or influence, died at home with symptoms of the deadly disease as they did not, or delayed to, go to hospital just to avoid the hassle of lobbying for a hospital bed that has already fallen short of the demand or out of fear that they might not get proper care there. 

Test for the virus is not much available here either. People standing in long queues in coronavirus testing centres in the capital and elsewhere in the country have become a common scene in recent days. Besides, those who have the access to the tests have to wait for days for the results, a delay which also helps aggravate the situation by allowing those waiting for the tests results to move freely and thus spread the virus to new areas. 

No doubt, the country lacks the capacity to receive the number of coronavirus patients that swarmed healthcare facilities in first-world countries like US, Italy, Spain and UK. But experts are in concurrence that we still have the capacity to handle the ongoing crisis well, if there is an effective coordination between public and private healthcare sectors. Moreover, the situation would not have come to such a pass, had the government taken effective measures to find out all coronavirus cases just in and around the capital, as the areas remained the epicenter of the pandemic even until recently, through proper tests and isolate the infected people from others in time.

Apparently to assuage people vociferous against the recent decision to end lockdown, policymakers repeatedly said that the decision was to save the national economy already at peril because of the lockdown. They also argued that the crisis might deepen further if the economy could not keep pace with its global competitors like Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the countries that are regarded as the most successful in fighting the invisible enemy of the human civilisation and have already become active in the global market. However, they do not mention that the countries made the achievement against the virus by just testing and isolating the coronavirus cases in a massive scale. Needless to say, Bangladesh does not lag far behind, rather has fared better than some ones in recent past, these countries in terms of economic might in particular. Hence, it is mostly policy failure of the health ministry top brass, which led to the false choice between life and livelihood.

Journalist; former student leader