While many of us do our part to slow the spread of Covid-19 through social distancing and working from home, our health care workers are out there on the front lines. They put themselves at risk so that those who are badly infected receive the right kind of attention.
Thousands of health care workers throughout the world have contracted Covid-19 while on the job, and the death toll keeps rising as well. Given that so many health care professionals have perished even in affluent, well-equipped nations like Italy and Spain, it goes without saying that doctors and nurses in Bangladesh are even more vulnerable, because to date, they lack the protective measures needed for the job at a time like this.
Health care workers in Bangladesh have expressed serious concern of the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), like masks, gloves, and gowns. In many places, the quality of protective gear is low. Masks, for example, need to be made of a certain material and of a certain standard to be effective, but many doctors and nurses are not being supplied with those.
In many public hospitals, patient temperature is not being checked at the entrance, which means Covid-19 patients could enter at any time, endangering all present. Furthermore, there are not enough hand-washing or sanitizing facilities in these institutions.
This situation has forced some conscientious doctors to buy their own protective gear out of their own pockets so that they can take care of this global health emergency we are currently going through. It has been over two weeks since WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and it is high time we treated our health workers better than this.
