Since the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic in the country in March last year, the country’s healthcare sector has been grappling with the herculean task of not only treating patients infected with the deadly virus, but also ensuring the safety of healthcare workers, including medics.
With a year having gone by, Bangladesh has improved a lot in catering to infected people, ensuring oxygen supply for patients being a notable instance of the steps it has taken.
Then again, a staggering rise in the daily Covid-19 caseload and fatalities for the past few days have rung alarm bells, as people are bewildered at circumstances relating to very few empty beds and hospitals, especially in hospital intensive care units (ICUs) across the country.
Patients with critical conditions are now the worst sufferers. The irony does not just stop there: even getting necessary oxygen supply has become an uphill task for the past few days—all because of an imbalance in the distribution of Covid-19 treatment facilities.
Attesting to the debacle, experts said the healthcare facilities dedicated for Covid-19 patients in Dhaka city had enough capacity for coronavirus treatment.
But a mass exodus from parts of the country had led to chaos in the hospitals concerned, making numerous patients and their attendants suffer immensely, they said.
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Good collaboration beginning from the upazila level health complexes to the district level medical college hospitals could have eased the situation, an absence of which was already taking a serious toll on those infected.
Additionally, an effective guideline and experiences of physicians who have already dealt with Covid-19 patients, could have come in handy in that case, the experts opine.
“We failed to fill the gaps although a year has passed. There has been development, which is not that significant,” said the former president of the Bangladesh Medical Association (BMA), Professor Dr. Rashid-E-Mahbub.
“For instance, the infrastructural ability did not change much and the central oxygen capacity has not been increased in many districts over the period,” he observed.
The new variant, he said, was very infectious as the number of patients kept on soaring.
“The demand for hospital beds and facilities are increasing, right at this moment—but we are in a crisis,” he said, hinting at the unequal distribution of Covid-19 hospitals.
A coordinated health care system starting from the upazila level to medical college hospitals would have ensured better treatment for these patients alongside lessening their sufferings, said former director (disease control) of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) Be-Nazir Ahmed.
“If patients coming from outside Dhaka could be treated locally, the Covid-19 healthcare facilities would have been enough for city residents,” he added.
As oxygen supply is a key factor, ensuring it at the upazila and district level would have helped 80% of patients to recover, the infectious diseases expert explained.
He went on to say that among the improvements done since the pandemic unfolded in Bangladesh was a sufficient stock of the High Flow Nasal Cannula (HFNC).
The experience of the last year had made doctors feel that HFNC and oxygen concentrators could help patients a lot, for they could have been cured before reaching the ICUs, he added.
Both experts criticized the acute shortage of ICUs, which severely infected Covdi-19 patients.
As installing ICUs is not the task of a single day, the government should have kept it in mind, for the greater relief of critical patients, he said.
The health authorities failed to establish good healthcare practices, like taking a patient from home to hospital, he said, adding that such an initiative could have reduced the hassle of people who were ill.
Information dissemination mechanism in question
Given the current situation, nothing could be more pleasing for a relative of a Covid 19 patient than accurate information about hospitals having vacant beds.
But this has become a rare case for both patients and their relatives.
Prof Be-Nazir said the DGHS was failing to disseminate information properly and on time.
The DGHS could have opened a hotline to confirm the number of vacant beds both in general wards and the ICUs at the dedicated hospitals.
Agreeing with him, Prof Rashid-E-Mahbub said information dissemination remained a failure on the part of the directorate.
“It not only failed to provide accurate information about beds, ICUs and facilities but also in making people aware through proper campaigning,” he concluded.