On April 28, the hospital recorded three confirmed Coronavirus cases: a doctor, a nurse and a patient in the employ of PHCN who had been on admission in the ward for a week.
The doctor hadn’t travelled out of town for weeks, meaning this was a case of community infection.
Therefore, it was hugely surprising that the hospital did not conduct proper contact tracing; the known primary contacts of these confirmed cases were not isolated.
Instead, the hospital management told them to continue working as usual.
As on May 3, one patient who had spent five days in the ward tested positive with three additional hospital staff, two nurses and a doctor tested positive for the virus too.
These nurses were primary contacts of the nurse who tested positive on April 28. Anyone would be forgiven for expecting the hospital, at this point, to learn from its mishandling of the index cases, but nothing changed.
Nurses and doctors in the same department who had repeated contact with the confirmed cases were not isolated.
They were told to continue working, consequently interacting with their colleagues, patients and families!
Now, the wife and two children of the doctor who tested positive on April 28 as well as two daughters of one of the nurses who tested positive on May 3 have all been presently positive.
Despite the scale of this tragedy, there isn’t yet one official statement from the hospital management announcing the confirmed cases to its staff or regulating the influx of people into the hospital & outpatient clinics.
Sadly, some healthcare workers at the FMC are starting to show symptoms of the virus, yet they’re being made to attend to other patients within the hospital.
The number of suspected cases in Azare has recently been rising rapidly in a manner similar to Kano’s.
FMC Azare urgently needs proper contact tracing and isolation of primary contacts of confirmed cases.
Delaying this intervention will fuel the festering of the stealthily-brewing health crisis in Azare, and it could spill to the rest of Bauchi.
In addition, some people in that hospital have shirked their responsibilities.
Those who bungled FMC Azare’s handling of these COVID-19 cases must be investigated, identified and punished as it will serve as a deterrence to other senior health officials elsewhere who have scant regard for the sanctity of the human lives in their care.
Source: FISAYO SOYOMBO on his Twitter handle.
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