Got Beds, Ventilators But No Doctors for Covid-19 ICU: Bengaluru Doctor’s Emotional Appeal Goes Viral

Bengaluru: A video of a private doctor appealing to fellow doctors to join the battle against the coronavirus went viral on Sunday, as the count of positive cases in Karnataka crossed 20,000 marks.

The specialist in the video is Taha Mateen, MD at HBS Hospital, in Bengaluru. In the video, Mateen urges specialists and nursing staff to come locally available and work at the emergency clinic by loaning some assistance in the Covid-19 ICU. He talks about the difficulty of specialists who are placing in 18-hour shifts. He underlines that there are beds, oxygen chambers and ventilators accessible at the medical clinic however no specialists to treat the patients. 

The 1-minute 46 seconds video additionally makes them request that specialists devote only six hours of their day to battle the pandemic. He makes an intense solicitation to medicos to become cutting edge warriors and to show the world they are doing this for humankind. 

In the interim, around 507 specialists under the flag of the Karnataka Government Contract Doctors Association have chosen to go on a three-day fight. These specialists are challenging the standard that gets rid of regularizing them under the



finance framework following a time of three years.

According to a press statement released by the association, the doctors are going to protest from July 6 to 8, with the plan on tendering mass resignations.

On July 6, the doctors will attend their duty wearing a black ribbon around their arm as a mark of protest. On July 7, they plan on observing a hunger strike by fasting the whole day. And finally on July 8, if the government doesn’t relent, they will all handover their papers as a sign of mass resignation.

According to one of the doctors, till 2017 all contract doctors would get absorbed under the government payroll after serving for a period of three years. However, this was done away after the matter had reached the doors of the apex court. Since 2007 till 2017 over 14 batches consisting of over 2,000 doctors were regularised.

In a bid to pacify the medicos, the Karnataka government decided to compensate them by increasing their salary from Rs 45,000 currently to Rs 60,000 per month. But the association has decided to go ahead and continue their protest till the government reinstates the old clause of absorbing contract workers under government payroll.