Coronavirus | Driven from pillar to post, a valuable life lost in Telangana

Tweet on 24-year-old’s condition evokes no response

Sheikh Reshma, a 24-year-old PG student, began coughing in the morning at her home in Namdevwada in Nizamabad on Tuesday. Her father Razzaq and her mother Fatima didn’t think about it much. But by afternoon the cough became intense and her father reached out to a neighbour and she was taken to the Nizamabad Government Hospital at 4 p.m. “A Rapid Antigen Test was conducted and it came out negative. The doctors told us to take the girl home as it wasn’t COVID-19,” says M. Prashant who helped the family and spoke to The Hindu on behalf of the family. The family got a CT scan at the hospital and showed it to a private practitioner who diagnosed serious damage to the lung, suggestive of COVID-19. But the Nizamabad hospital refused to admit her. “By 9 p.m. she had difficulty in breathing and we hired an ambulance with oxygen and started towards Hyderabad to admit her in a government hospital,” says Mr. Prashant. At 10.15 p.m. with the ambulance speeding towards Hyderabad, the family sent out a tweet tagging IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao, the Health Minister and the MLC of Nizamabad.