I was at home with my family in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapur city when military helicopters showered petals over COVID-19 hospitals in May 2020. This was among the several instances in this pandemic when the government as well as the citizens attached heroism and sacrifice to the duty of healthcare workers and projected them as “warriors.” While news channels praised the government for honouring its healthcare workers, my doctor friends—many of whom were working in COVID-19 hospitals in different parts of the country—made acerbic remarks about the act on WhatsApp groups. As the government gained brownie points in their name, these doctors were living the reality behind these spectacular stunts, many being sent to a “war-like scenario” without the required weapons—protective gear. Soon, I experienced the hollowness of this gesture myself.
Around the first week of May, I read in a newspaper report that the state government was looking to recruit doctors for COVID-19 hospitals on a six-month contract. Initially, I restrained myself from applying. Working in the high viral-load zone of a COVID ward meant putting my family members at risk, especially as they have co-morbid ailments. The fledgling status of our healthcare system was another reason for my hindrance. It is possible that other doctors in town shared my concerns—the posts to contain the pandemic were also open to doctors with a bachelor of dental surgery. In the second half of July, I saw in a local newspaper that only 151 doctors had applied for 223 available posts for surgery.
Later, I learnt that COVID-19 doctors are allocated accommodation in three different hotels in Anantapur town, which allayed some of my apprehensions. I walked out of the home to apply for the contract job on 28 August. I meandered in the drab corridors of government buildings, and filled up numerous forms and wrote various letters. I entered into an agreement with the state government to work as a general duty medical officer at the COVID ward of the Super Speciality Hospital, which comes under the jurisdiction of the Government General Hospital. The agreement stated various rules that I had follow, including that I had to “reside at bonafide official headquarters.” The district medical and health office of Anantapur gave me a receipt to reside in a hotel for six months. By my estimate, about fifty doctors from three COVID-19 hospitals in the Anantapur district were staying in the same hotel as me.
I joined work on 29 August, and within three to four days, I was struck with a high fever. A rapid-antigen test confirmed that I had contracted the novel coronavirus. I was admitted in another hospital for a while and later quarantined at home until I tested negative. I was only able to resume work on 26 September.
A certain sense of despair besets one while working in a COVID-19 hospital and seeing the same morbid scenes every day. The situation tends to be so volatile that even a moment of neglect can result in saturation of blood oxygen dropping to dangerous levels. Several COVID patients who turn up at the hospital are depressed as they have already lost a loved one to the virus. Some of them refuse to get treated out of grief. The most incomprehensible times for a doctor are those when patients do not cooperate with the treatment. Their resistance is understandable as they see the same scenes as us and share our despair. I often see an empty bed in the COVID ward and wonder if the patient who used to occupy it has been discharged or shifted to an ICU or is deceased. This keeps me mentally occupied, even in my dreams.
The administration worsened our distress. A couple of days after I resumed work, word spread among my colleagues that an official said that we should vacate our rooms as the government did not have the funds to pay hotel bills. Soon, there were murmurs on WhatsApp groups of doctors in the city about a plan to relocate us. Around the end of September, a staffer at the hotel told me that the government is not paying the bills and the hotel owner is pressurising the staff to make us vacate our rooms. The staff was kind to us throughout the ordeal, but the urgency of these updates from them increased with time. While all these developments increased our collective anxiety, all this could easily be hearsay; no official notification or statement was issued to inform us.
We thought that we will be given some sort of a document asking us to leave our hotels. But we only received vague answers or fits of anger from the authorities. This, despite our fears about house-hunting during the pandemic being obvious—it is difficult to get accommodation in a small city, especially as a COVID doctor. Shifting in a pandemic would be even worse for those facing financial constraints.
For the next couple of weeks of October, we went to meet some high-level administration officials regarding the matter. According to my colleagues who spoke to the officials, all of them gave different responses, ranging from “I don’t know that this is happening, I will look into it” to “Government has no funds to pay for the accommodation of doctors.” It would take days for an official to even refer our complaint to another official. Meanwhile, the hotel’s management continued to pressurise us into vacating the rooms by citing verbal approvals of officials from the same bureaucratic universe.
Probably due to our constant badgering about the matter, on 9 October, a doctor in our hospital informed us that the office of Kameswara Prasad, the district medical and health officer, or DMHO, called him to say that we have to vacate the rooms, but the administration may provide us accommodation in a different place. We heard that we will be made to stay in a building about ten kilometres away from the hospital—traveling to and fro from there would have been difficult, especially since we all have night duties on a rotational basis. Eventually, the administration did not provide us with any alternate accommodation. It felt like they were forcing us to take a place for rent.
On 10 October, some of my colleagues went to meet A Siri, the joint collector, to take this to her notice. “We waited for two hours to meet the joint collector in the morning,” one of the doctors who met Siri told me on the condition of anonymity. “On approaching her, she said—without the doctors even initiating the conversation—‘I am not giving you accommodations. You BDS guys are given your salaries. What is your problem?’” By “BDS guys,” Siri referred to the doctors with a bachelor’s of dental surgery who had opted to work in COVID-19 hospitals. The doctor told me, “We never begged for jobs. They released a notification. We joined.”
The government has not paid me or any doctor I know from the three COVID hospitals even once, as of 11 November. On 23 October, a doctor made a remark about pending salaries on a WhatsApp group of doctors and district administration officials that I am a part of. To this, an administration official replied that budget has to be released by state government, which had not been done for any district till now. The official added that “approvals” have to be given by the chief minister, YS Jaganmohan Reddy. Still, there was no clarity on when we would get our salaries.
In the second week of October, the DMHO office called one of my colleagues and directed all of us to vacate our rooms by 20 October. There was no official communication or documentation about any of this. I was lucky to find a place in a couple of days, but some doctors who were not from Anantapur had to put themselves in the maze of the town’s alien streets. All of us had to endure this while performing our duties in the hospital. I know of several doctors who are hiding that they were working in a COVID hospital from their new landlords for fear of being thrown out again. The ordeal of living on rent would have been easier had we been paid our salaries.
I now find myself in the same place as the COVID doctors who were openly cynical of the petal-showering act. Each time I make a call and have to listen to an automated voice say, “Doctors and medical personnel are of utmost importance in these times,” I am reminded of the authorities’ cruel betrayal.